Last Poems

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 Housman was an emotionally withdrawn man whose closest friend Moses Jackson had been his roommate when he was at Oxford in 1877-1882. In the 1920s, when Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman selected forty-one previously unpublished poems into a volume entitled "Last Poems", for him to read.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

External links

*" [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7848 Last Poems] " from Project Gutenberg
* [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/HouShro.html A Shropshire Lad]