Last Poems
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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 Housman was an emotionally withdrawn man whose closest friend Moses Jackson had been his roommate when he was at Oxford in 1877-1882. In the 1920s, when Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman selected forty-one previously unpublished poems into a volume entitled Last Poems, for him to read.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
