“you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling / good luck, babe”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, Kipling’s slightly older contemporary has a slightly different take on the layered past:

“On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble,” A.E. Housman

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
    His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
    And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
    When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
    But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
    At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
    The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
    Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
    Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
    It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
    Are ashes under Uricon.


“Slightly” different. First published in A Shropshire Lad (1896).

---L.

Subject quote, which works for most of Housman tbh, from Good Luck, Babe, Chappell Roan.

Comments

[mme_n_b]

I must be very dim today, but how is it different? I'm hearing the same "continuity of England from Roman times to now, interconnected through the hills and the forests" theme - same blood, same thoughts, different human. What do you hear in this?

[larryhammer]

Well, to start, Housman emphasizes continuity with the past, and Kipling the changes. For another, Housman's connection of past and present is secular, via history, while Kipling's is supernatural.

[mme_n_b]

Thank you :)
I think Housman talks about continuity and changes in equal measure, but that is a matter of reading. And I guess I can see how you'd get Kipling's connection to the past as being through supernatural rather than through history, by comparing to Rewards and Fairies rather than to Puck of Pook's hill.

[larryhammer]

Well, I was talking about this and last week's poems in particular -- in general, Kipling sees more connection through history than change, and via more often through secular than supernatural means.

[mme_n_b]

Sorry, of course I was being dim "specifically last week" is the missing piece :)

[sovay]

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble

The occasion of one of my favorite Anthony Lane lines: "We are supposed to be in deepest pastoral, but that sounds to me like someone running into a bar to report a nearby fight."

[edit] And clarifying for me that I probably stole some of this ethos for one of my own poems without noticing, although I think really I believe in both kinds of time: the continuity under everything and all the details that are lost.

[larryhammer]

It is a ethos that easily rubs off onto writers.

[graydon]

"Get you the sons your fathers got, and God will save the Queen."

Houseman is in this odd way a much more violent poet than Kipling; there's a customary layer of abstraction that isn't in Houseman's language. It's not lurid, it's not improper, but you can feel the crunch and the thud.

[larryhammer]

That's one reason it's so fascinating to compare the two.

[cmcmck]

We live right under the Wrekin and a few miles from Uricon (Viroconium) so this is a huge favourite.

[larryhammer]

I knew that. :)