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from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem "Grantchester" is something worse
than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a
valuable document.
Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the week-ending spirit of
Brooke and the others. The "country" motif is there all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of
the poems have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealised rustic, in reality Strephon or Corydon
brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience shows that over-civilised people
enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase, "close to the soil") because they imagine them to be more
primitive and passionate than themselves. Hence the "dark earth" novels of Sheila Kaye-Smith, 13 etc.
And at that time a middle-class boy, with his "country" bias, would identify with an agricultural
worker as he would never have thought of doing with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a
vision of an idealised ploughman, gypsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a wild, free,
roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting, horses, beer and women. Masefield's
Everlasting Mercy, 14 another valuable period-piece, immensely popular with boys round about the
war years, gives you this vision in a very crude form. But Housman's Maurices and Terences could be
taken seriously where Masefield's Saul Kane could not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield
with a dash of Theocritus. Moreover all his themes are adolescent—murder, suicide, unhappy love,
early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up
against the "bedrock facts" of life:
And again:
The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood has dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
And whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.
It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. "Dick lies long in the
churchyard and Ned lies long in jail." And notice also the exquisite self-pity—the "nobody loves me"
feeling:
The diamond drops adorning
The low mound on the lea,
Those are the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee. 15
Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents.
And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries somebody else) seemed like
wisdom to boys who were herded together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of