"Yon Far Country"

I would like to stay in "the land of lost content" for a moment longer.

Into my heart an air that kills
     From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
     What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
     I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
     And cannot come again.

A. E. Housman, Poem XL, A Shropshire Lad (1896).

In my previous post, I placed this poem in apposition to the phrase "the past is a foreign country."  The "far country" referred to by Housman is the lost, irredeemable past.  In Housman's case, the defining feature of that irrecoverable past is the boundless prospect of love, a love that proved to be unrequited.

George Rose (1882-1955), "Fyfield, Essex" (c. 1951)

The "far country" of the past can be found in another poem by Housman.

Alas, the country whence I fare,
     It is where I would stay;
And where I would not, it is there
     That I shall be for aye.

A. E. Housman, More Poems (1936).  "Aye" is used in the sense of "ever, always, continually."  OED.

Housman's two poems bring to mind this:

                         Memory

Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in William Rossetti (editor), The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1903).

Although Housman was at pains to point out that he was not a Stoic in the Greek and Roman philosophical sense, I would suggest that he was nevertheless a lower-case stoic in terms of the expression of his emotions. He would likely find Rossetti's poem to be a bit florid.  But I think it fits.

George Rose, "Breaking the Clod"

I am also drawn back to J. L. Carr's novel A Month in the Country, which, as I have noted before, contains echoes of Housman's poetry.  Some brief background:  the story is centered on Tom Birkin, a veteran of the First World War who has received a commission to restore a Medieval wall-painting in a small church in "Oxgodby."  Here are the novel's concluding paragraphs (for those of you who have not read the book, and may wish to, there are no "spoilers" in the following passage):

"And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sureness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand.

It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Housman had stood in that place, regretting his land of lost content.  And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart -- knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever -- the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago.  And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby.  So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow."

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980; revised 1990).

George Rose, "The Usurper's Field"

"We Can Ask And Ask But We Can't Have Again What Once Seemed Ours For Ever": J. L Carr

In my previous post, I mentioned J. L. Carr in connection with A. E. Housman's cherry trees.  I also mentioned Carr's novel A Month in the Country (1980), which tells the story of Tom Birkin, a First World War veteran who has been hired to uncover a Medieval wall-painting in the loft of a small church in rural "Oxgodby."  To quote one of the novel's epigraphs (from Samuel Johnson):  it is "a small tale, generally of love."

Carr's novel has its own connections with Housman.  He provides its second epigraph:

Now for a breath I tarry,
   Nor yet disperse apart --
Take my hand quick and tell me,
   What have you in your heart?

The source is poem XXXII ("From far, from eve and morning") of A Shropshire Lad.  Housman returns at the close of the novel.  (The following passages do not include any "spoilers," should anyone be interested in reading the novel hereafter.)  Over the past month, Birkin has discovered that the wall-painting  is an undiscovered masterpiece by an unknown hand.  Other things have transpired as well.  He decides to take a final look at the painting.

"And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sureness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand.

It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Housman had stood in that place, regretting his land of lost content.  And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart -- knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever -- the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago.  And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby.  So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow."

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980; revised 1990).  The source of "regretting his land of lost content" is poem XL of A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
   From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
   What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
   I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
   And cannot come again.

                Stanley Roy Badmin, "Summer, Stopham Bridge" (1962)

"Loveliest Of Trees": A. E. Housman And J. L. Carr

In this fairly temperate part of the world, the cherry trees are in bloom.  This means that, just as Philip Larkin appears each year in May ("Yet still the unresting castles thresh/In fullgrown thickness every May"), so A. E. Housman appears each year in spring:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896). 

The poem reminds me of an anecdote about J. L. Carr, the novelist whose masterpiece is A Month in the Country (1980).  Carr was the headmaster of Highfields School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, from 1952 until 1967.

"His ageing former pupils recalled, as in a dream, the headmaster who every year had the whole primary school march through a housing estate, past trees in blossom, all 200 of them reciting the Housman poem, 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . .'  Forty years on, to their surprise, they realised they still had the poem by heart."

Byron Rogers, The Last Englishman: The Life of J. L. Carr (2003).

                             Julian Trevelyan, "The Cherry Tree" (1946)