great textual critic of Latin poetry, he kept his own verse quite separate, his second
volume,Last Poems, appearing in 1922.
A Shropshire Ladis set in a timeless country inhaled from the pages of Horace as
much as in Shropshire, a county Housman hardly knew. Its short lyrics, simple in
form and refined in diction, turn on youth and death. A note of stoic, contained
despair is struck plangently and often. Some of the poems have been set to music:
‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, ‘In summertime on Bredon’, ‘Is my team plough-
ing?’, ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’. Much of Housman is in this short
poem:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highway where I went
And cannot come again.
Pastoral nostalgia rarely has this painful economy. In Hardy, Wilde and Housman
there is a temptation to self-pity which is not always resisted.Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Most of the notable poems of the time are not at all aesthetic. An earlier, remarkable
work, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ by James Thomson(1834–1882), pen-name
‘B.V.’, and John Davidson’s pseudo-Cockney ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ are poems of the
urban wasteland, both by Scots. Some are ruggedly earnest, such as W. E. Henley’s
‘Invictus’ (‘I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul’) and ‘England,322 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900
Rudyard Kipling, by W. Cushing Loring.