lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THE NINETIESDying Day of Death, and some shorter pieces, and inthe New Poems of 1905 the fine ode: " If I were Sleep."To these should be added two other finely buildedodes, The Titanic and War.But I must say a word in closing on the two poetswho sang the swan-song of the century, its faiths andhopes and dreams. A Shropshire Lad(1896) came uponus in the nineties, not yet grown familiar with blasphemy,angry or flippant, as the present generationhas, like an explosive, stinging shell, Mr Housmanhas but one theme, and his insistence, in poem afterpoem, does just a little recall Carlyle's story of thetraveller at an inn who laid down his knife and fork atintervals to exclaim in tones of eloquent woe, "I'velost my a-a-a-appetite"; but the poet has expressedhis loss of appetite for life, his Swiftian anger withall that makes it bitter—the unhappy course of truelove, the grim shadow of approaching death, it maybe on the gallows—with a concision and perfection ofform worthy of the Greek Anthology. His measuresare of the simplest—Long Measure, Common or BalladMeasure, and Alexandrines, the last generally dividedinto three and three. But occasionally as his strainrises he uses a longer and more plangent line, or runsthe two sections of the Alexandrine more closelytogether:Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle.Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.Think rather, call to mind, if now you grieve a little,The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long,and in the New Poems (1922), "The chestnut castshis flambeaux, and the flowers," and, in seven-footlines, the passionate poem, " 'Tis mute the word they153