Saturday May 19 2012
Art & Literature Archive
Village Art & Literature
‘The farms of home lie lost in even’
Posted on February 20 2009 at 12:08:41 0 comments
Jim Page, chairman of The Housman Society, lights the birthday beacons for Bromsgrove’s most famous son, A E Housman.
Have you ever stood outside Tardebigge church and looked at the wonderful westerly view over Bromsgrove towards the “blue remembered” hills of Shropshire?
The lofty spire of St John’s Bromsgrove catches the eye and it was a view that was very familiar to A E Housman, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated this year.
The farms of home lie lost in even,
I see far off the steeple stand;
West and away from here to heaven
Still is the land.
Housman did not think it one of his best poems, so although it was written before the publication of his most famous work, A Shropshire Lad, he did not include it in that volume, and it only saw the light of day when, after his death, his brother Laurence printed a collection of poems that he thought worth saving.
Housman used to visit Tardebigge most summers as his brother Basil was an assistant Schools Medical Officer for Worcestershire, and lived in the Lower House there with his wife Jeannie, who was a member of the wealthy Dixon family.
They had inherited an old Austin car and on Alfred’s visits he was taken on excursions to favourite spots where he could indulge his passion for walking.
Clent was a favourite destination and in 1887 on the night of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee he watched the beacons burn across the Midlands – a sight recorded in the first poem of A Shropshire Lad.
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.
Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because ’tis fifty years tonight
That God has saved the Queen.
This year A E Housman’s beacon burns bright because the Housman Society, which is based in Bromsgrove, is leading a number of celebrations to mark this 150th anniversary.
His birthday was March 26 and on that date there will be a gathering by the statue in Bromsgrove High Street at which Nick Owen, the Midlands Today presenter, who has long been a Housman fan, will read from A Shropshire Lad.
Graham Trew, a baritone whose double LP in 1980 was responsible for the revival of interest in musical settings of Housman poems, will sing.
The third guest that day will be Ludlow photographer Gareth Thomas, whose pictures illustrate a new edition of A Shropshire Lad.
A Ludlow publication is very apt, as the cycle of poems is mainly set in a half-imaginary Shropshire, a “land of lost content”, in which a farm “lad” or a soldier is the protagonist.
In “Is my team ploughing” a heartsick young man is already dead and speaking from beyond the grave in order to pursue his fickle sweetheart, his questions being neatly answered by his girl’s new lover.
As it happens it was the favourite of another great English poet, Thomas Hardy, and it has certainly inspired Gareth Thomas to produce a striking image, which is reproduced on the cover of The Village.
“Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
Other highlights in the year will be a celebrity concert in Ludlow’s Parish Church, a day of celebration in Housman’s old college, St John’s Oxford, a lecture at the Hay festival of Literature and a Weekend in Housman Hall, formerly Perry Hall, which used to be the Housman family home.
Alfred Edward Housman, poet and pre-eminent classicist of his time, was born in the Valley House (now called Housmans), Fockbury, two miles from Bromsgrove. His grandfather, Rev Thomas Housman, had come to Bromsgrove in 1836 and became the vicar of the newly built Catshill Church.
AEH’s father, Edward, was brought up in the village and eventually married Sarah Jane Williams, of Woodchester. Soon after AEH was born they moved to Perry Hall, where his parents gave their seven children an idyllic childhood until Sarah Jane died in 1871 on Housman’s twelfth birthday. This was the first of a number of sadnesses in AEH’s life.
A move back to Fockbury followed, and after winning a scholarship to Bromsgrove School, he walked there every day through fields and orchards – an experience which gave Housman an understanding of the countryside in all seasons that was to serve him so well when he came to write his poetry.
He obtained a very good grounding in classics at Bromsgrove School and in 1877 earned a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford. In spite of failing his finals at Oxford, Housman was determined to recover his scholastic career and over the next ten years, as a result of his studies in the British Museum, published many classical papers.
On the strength of these and references from 15 leading classicists of the day he was, to the amazement of all, appointed Professor of Latin at University College London. After 19 years at UCL he moved to Cambridge to be Professor of Latin at the university and spent the rest of his life there.
But for all his success as a classical scholar it was the writing of A Shropshire Lad that made him famous. The poems reflect many of the troubles he had been through in his life. They have a rural setting which is distilled in the countryside of Worcestershire, but much as he loved the county of his birth, it was the never-never land of Shropshire which stirred his imagination.
In Poem 50, one of his shortest and most pithy, almost every line has a memorable phrase which will ensure that Housman’s name will still be remembered when another 150 years have passed.
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 highways where I went
And cannot come again.
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