[Orwn Acra]

When I lived in England, the Housman Society sent be a copy of Unkind to Unicorns, a little sampling of the miserable Latinist's lighter works. It's a shame he didn't write more of the stuff, because it's quite good, and combines the morality of Belloc with the mathematical crispness of Carroll.

Some examples:

Inhuman Henry or
Cruelty to Fabulous Animals

Oh would you know why Henry sleeps,
And why his mourning Mother weeps,
And why his weeping Mother mourns?
He was unkind to unicorns.

No unicorn, with Henry’s leave,
Could dance upon the lawn at eve,
Or gore the gardener’s boy in spring
Or do the very slightest thing.

No unicorn could safely roar,
And dash its nose against the door,
Nor sit in peace upon the mat
To eat the dog, or drink the cat.

Henry would never in the least
Encourage the heraldic beast:
If there were unicorns about
He went and let the lion out.

The lion, leaping from its chain
And glaring through its tangled mane,
Would stand on end and bark and bound
And bite what unicorns it found.

And when the lion bit a lot
Was Henry sorry? He was not.
What did his jumps betoken? Joy.
He was a bloody-minded boy.

The Unicorn is not a Goose,
And when they saw the lion loose
They grew increasingly aware
That they had better not be there.

And oh, the unicorn is fleet
And spurns the earth with all its feet.
The lion had to snap and snatch
At tips of tails it could not catch.

Returning home in temper bad,
It met the sanguinary lad,
And clasping Henry with its claws
It took his legs between its jaws.

‘Down, lion, down!’ said Henry, ‘cease!
My legs immediately release.’
His formidable feline pet
Made no reply, but only ate.

The last words that were ever said
By Henry’s disappearing head,
In accents of indignant scorn,
Were, ‘I am not a unicorn’.

And now you know why Henry sleeps,
And why his Mother mourns and weeps,
And why she also weeps and mourns;
So now be kind to unicorns.

Which I think is about homophobia. Meanwhile, the Belloc influence shows in poems like "the African Lion", which combines Belloc's Cautionary Tales with his Bad Child's Book of Beasts:

To meet a bad lad on the African waste
Is a thing that a lion enjoys;
But he rightly and strongly objects to the taste
Of good and uneatable boys.

When he bites off a piece of a boy of that sort
He spits it right out of his mouth,
And retires with a loud and dissatisfied snort
To the east, or the west, or the south.

So lads of good habits, on coming across
A lion, need feel no alarm
For they know they are sure to escape with the loss
Of a leg, or a head, or an arm.

What I like about these poems - and here's how Housman is more Carroll than Lear - is their silky smoothness. He delivers the poems with matter-of-factness and scientific zing that ape the dryness of a biology textbook, even when the creatures become legendary:

Thomasina and the Amphisbaena or
the Horrors of Horticulture

'In the back back garden, Thomasina,
Did you recently vociferate a squeal?'
'Oh, I trod up an amphisbaena,
And it bit me on the toe and on the heel.
Yes, it bit me (do you know)
With its tail upon the toe,
While it bit me with its head upon the heel!'

'How excessively distracting and confusing.
Pray what, Thomasina, did you do?'
'Oh, I took the garden scissors I was using
And I snipped it irretrievably in two.
And it split with such a scrunch
That I shall not want my lunch.
And if you had heard the noise no more would you.'

'And where, Thomasina, are the sections
Of the foe that you courageously repressed?'
'Oh, they ran away in opposite directions,
And they vanished in the east and in the west.
And the way they made me squint,
It would melt a heart of flint,
And I think that I will go upstairs and rest.'

An amphisbaena is a snake with a head at both ends. I'll end with this poem, which isn't in the short collection I have:

As into the Garden Elizabeth Ran

As into the garden Elizabeth ran
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann,
She trod on an object that lay in her road,
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was;
And after supporting Elizabeth's tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.

Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind,
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind,
And Ann in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive.

She was heard to arrive, for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang,
As her breath on the breezes she broadly bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth's toad.

Elizabeth, saved by the sole of her boot,
Escaped her insensible sister's pursuit;
And if ever hereafter she irritates Ann,
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because / A toad was the actual object it was is the kind of recursive logic I enjoy so much, and the kind that pops up in Carroll's work.

If you have any more light Housman, please share; my book doesn't have everything. I'm also interested in light verse written by poets one doesn't normally associate with levity.