Housman Country by Peter Parker

Author:Peter Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

It was in his very bones – Worcestershire was everything to him, the very look of spring coming, the cottages, the gardens, the fields and fruit orchards were different to his mind in Worcestershire from anywhere else. He loved England and would delight in seeing places new to him and get their atmosphere and understand the feeling of other parts of England – but Worcestershire remained supreme. From walking, driving and bicycling there was very little of the county he did not know, and his memory for every village however remote, and every lane however twisty and bewildering, was extraordinary. He had a wonderful gift of sense of locality and a wonderful memory.

The Singing Lad

The influential music critic Edwin Evans felt that A Shropshire Lad offered English composers what the poetry of Verlaine had recently offered the French. It was, he wrote in 1918, a volume ‘in which the truly lyrical qualities of the English language are reflected as they have seldom been, if ever, in our time. Within the same number of years, or less, from their publication, the poems of Verlaine, in which the essential lyrical qualities of the French language have the same prominence, had supplied the foundation of a veritable library of French song which threatens in course of time to become as formidable as that which owes its existence to the poetry of Heinrich Heine.’

He went on to suggest that English composers had been ‘slow to discern’ the qualities of Housman’s poetry, and in this he and his colleague and rival, Ernest Newman, were for once in agreement. At this stage, Newman felt that composers had not yet taken full advantage of what Housman offered: ‘Mr. Housman’s book of poems, – now a quarter of a century old, – is so purely English a thing that it is a pity our English composers have not found a real musical equivalent of it. Had we a [Hugo] Wolf among us, it would not have been a mere poem or two here and there from the collection that he would have set. He would have felt that here was something peculiarly English from first to last; and he would have set virtually the whole of the sixty-three poems, doing for Mr. Housman what Wolf did for Mörike, for Goethe, for Eichendorff, and others.’

By the time the two critics were writing, English composers had in fact begun to set Housman’s poems, though often without particular distinction. The earliest evidence of permission being sought to set a poem from A Shropshire Lad is a letter Housman wrote to Grant Richards in June 1903. ‘I have no objection to Mr Ettrick setting the verse to music,’ he told his publisher, ‘but I have not extracted fees from other people who have set other pieces, so I don’t want to begin now.’ There is no trace of any Housman settings by Henry Havelock Ettrick, a composer who appears similarly to have vanished into oblivion, leaving behind a handful of published songs.

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