[Ann Drysdale]

And "Mrs Winslow's" was in fact tincture of opium - Excelsior!

[Jerome Betts]

Illuminating, Ann. Hadn't realised the syrup was once a real brand
like Fiery Jack's Rubbing Ointment and other delights.

Interestingly, in the Unkind To Unicorns collection only one piece - not one of the best IMHO - would very distantly suggest Housman's serious verse if you didn't know the author. For me two or three lines have trochaic echoes of other poems and fragments.

Now all day the horned herds
Dance to the piping of the birds;
Now the bumble-bee is rife
And other forms of insect life;
The skylark in the sky so blue
Now makes noise enough for two,
And lovers on the grass so green
- Muse, oh Muse, eschew th'obscene.

[Gail White]

I love Housman. Didn't he write "And have you caught the Tiger? "
I think he's also the man who wrote this one:

"Hallelujah!" was the final observation
That escaped Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane
As she tumbled off the platform in the station
And was cut in little pieces by the train.
Hallelujah, hallelujah,
Mary Jane, the train is through you,
We will gather up the fragments that remain.

[Chris Childers]

I'll paste this in, as it may be unknown to someone. Housman's parody of his beloved Aeschylus:

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan.
ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

Strophe

In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Antistrophe

Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.
She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts
I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

Epode

But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
CHORUS: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

[Gail White]

Never mind. Something I tried to post here didn't work!

[Jerome Betts]

Chris, I think it was 'the horrors of classical translation' (in 1893) rather than Aeschylus that Housman was having so much fun with.

Gail, 'O have you caught the tiger?' is also in Unkind To Unicorns.
Incidentally, in the Hallelujah saga Housman has the rhyme as 'through yer:'. Nice contrast in tone with the decorous 'We will gather up the fragments that remain.'

[Orwn Acra]

Thanks for the poems. Some of them I knew, some of them were new. I remember seeing a Complete Works of his one time -- it had everything, his juvenilia included -- but can't remember the title of it.

[John Whitworth]

The Complete Poetical Works of A.E. Housman?

The book you want is edited by a fellow called Archie Burnett and will set you back $250. Jesus wept, as Housman would doubtless have remarked.