fifty springs are little room

Good morning, and welcome to April. This will be the seventh year I have celebrated National Poetry Month, and because I am a slightly superstitious person who grew up reading too many books based on fairy tales and Child Ballads, I have to admit to feeling like if I make it through this year without anybody getting sacrificed to Hell, we'll be doing pretty well. SEVEN YEARS. Holy crap.

…and after that auspicious beginning, here are the rules: There will be something approximating a poem a day from today until the end of the month. I am both eclectic and predictable. I try not to repeat poets within the course of the month, and I try not to repeat poems I have posted in previous years, but I definitely do not promise not to break my own rules.

It's a beautiful morning, and not, in fact, snowing on the first day of April. Nevertheless, I think this is a good place to begin.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

—A. E. Housman, II from A Shropshire Lad (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co.), 1896. I have a lot of feelings about Housman.

livelier liquor than the muse

‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

~A.E. Housman (1859-1936), LXII, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", from A Shropshire Lad, 1896.

Oh, Hous. Molly prohibited herself from posting Housman, this month, but she didn't prohibit me from posting Housman. Sometimes I think Stoppard may have done me a great disservice with The Invention of Love. I am way too invested in A.E. Housman. Stop falling in love with straight boys, Hous!

diffugere nives

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

~A.E. Housman, "The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux", or IX from Last Poems, 1922.

I am unwell, which is unfortunate given my to-do list, and also the fact that I meant to go to the National Archives today, but fortunate (every cloud, silver lining, etc.) in that I spent the day in bed, ate soup, and watched The History Boys, which I loved. I am now going to go read all the History Boys fic in the Yuletide archive. Is it any wonder that I am thinking of Housman? In a strange sequence of conflating events, I also finished re-reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog today, and have, just now, read my favorite bits of Stoppard's The Invention of Love, which is, as always, the play of my heart.

pathetic fallacy

It's raining, and gloomy, which requires mopey Victorians. I briefly considered In Memorium, but A. E. Housman is the mopiest of all mopey Victorians, and I love him.

X.

The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:

It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.

XI.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of
That will not dream of me.

~ A. E. Housman, Feb. 1893, "The weeping Pleiads wester," from More Poems.

Sometimes I kind of want to beat up Moses Jackson for making Hous all mopey, but that would probably be counterproductive. I nearly posted Diffugere Nives, actually, but I couldn't without The Invention of Love and Horace on hand. My favorite Housman poem is actually "From far, from eve and morning," but that's a travel poem and this is a depressing rainy day poem, so here we are.

I'm really liking this poem-a-day thing! I think I shall keep it up.