Last Poems by A.E. Housman



Last Poems (1922) is the second and last of the two volumes of poems A. E. Housman published during his lifetime - the first, and better-known, being A Shropshire Lad (1896). Housman was an emotionally withdrawn man whose closest friend Moses Jackson had been his roommate when he was at Oxford in 1877-1882. In the 1920s, when Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman selected forty-one previously unpublished poems into a volume entitled Last Poems, for him to read. The introduction to the volume explains his rationale:

''I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my first book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came; and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation. About a quarter of this matter belongs to the April of the present year, but most of it to dates between 1895 and 1910.''
 * September 1922.

Among these poems, Number XXXVII, EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES is perhaps the best-known:


 * These, in the day when heaven was falling,
 * The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
 * Followed their mercenary calling
 * And took their wages and are dead.


 * Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
 * They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
 * What God abandoned, these defended,
 * And saved the sum of things for pay.

The 41 poems in this volume are listed below. Where a poem is untitled, the first line is given in italics:
 * I THE WEST
 * II (As I gird on for fighting)
 * III (Her strong enchantments failing)
 * IV ILLIC JACET
 * V GRENADIER
 * VI LANCER
 * VII (In valleys green and still)
 * VIII (Soldier from the wars returning)
 * IX (The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers)
 * X (Could man be drunk for ever)
 * XI (Yonder see the morning blink)
 * XII (   The laws of God, the laws of man)
 * XIII THE DESERTER
 * XIV THE CULPRIT
 * XV EIGHT O’CLOCK
 * XVI SPRING MORNING
 * XVII ASTRONOMY
 * XVIII (The rain, it streams on stone and hillock)
 * XIX (In midnights of November)
 * XX (The night is freezing fast)
 * XXI (The fairies break their dances)
 * XXII (The sloe was lost in flower)
 * XXIII (In the morning, in the morning)
 * XXIV EPITHALAMIUM
 * XXV THE ORACLES
 * XXVI (The half-moon westers low, my love)
 * XXVII (The sigh that heaves the grasses)
 * XXVIII (Now dreary dawns the eastern light)
 * XXIX (Wake not for the world-heard thunder)
 * XXX SINNER’S RUE
 * XXXI HELL’S GATE
 * XXXII (When I would muse in boyhood)
 * XXXIII (When the eye of day is shut)
 * XXXIV THE FIRST OF MAY
 * XXXV (When first my way to fair I took)
 * XXXVI REVOLUTION
 * XXXVII EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES
 * XXXVIII (Oh stay at home, my lad, and plough)
 * XXXIX (When summer’s end is nighing)
 * XL (Tell me not here, it needs not saying)
 * XLI FANCY’S KNELL