This week's poem is my favourite of AE Housman's superbly melancholy lyrics. The poem beginning "When summer's end is nighing" is numbered but untitled, like all the others in the 1922 collection, Last Poems, Housman compiled and published this collection specifically so it could be read by Moses Jackson, the object of his life-long, probably unrequited love, who, by this time, lay terminally ill in Canada.
The metre is typical of Housman's most sigh-laden style: iambic trimeter, with alternating feminine and masculine endings. His stanza form of choice is often the quatrain, rhyming a/b/c/b or a/b/a/b. But, in the current poem, he expands the a/b/c/b unit to five lines. And his "b" rhyme gets a further rhyme, so each stanza, in effect, ends on a couplet. This extra rhyme-line gives him scope to widen the thought or heighten the emotion of the particular stanza, and to avoid the patness that a neat quatrain can have. It's the same stanzaic form he uses for the much-loved earlier lyric, "On Bredon Hill".
The fifth line may also signal a new direction, and work against the cadence to look forward to the subsequent stanza. "When I was young and proud," the first stanza's last line, connects us to the next episode, and a remembered experience of watching the sun go down, sketched in wonderfully compressed images of the weathercock losing "the slanted ray", and the young speaker climbing the hill for a larger view.
Housman is a poet who often seems to be on the verge of saying the conventional poetic thing, and then, in a flash, turns it in a new direction. It may simply be the matter of an unexpected phrase or even a single word. A less original poet would have chosen "nearing" rather than "nighing" for the first-line end-verb. This is not a choice decided by the need for a rhyme, because the "a" line in the poem never rhymes. "Nighing" is a curious archaism: it's not even a particularly melodious word, but perhaps the fact that it rhymes with another present participle that the poem resists, "sighing", underlies its haunting effect. Finally, the verb reappears in a different tense. This time, "nighs" meets with its natural word-mate, "sighs". It's one small example of an enormous technical skill in the shaping and integration of individual units and whole poem. But this skill is un-showy. It serves something that, for Housman, was all-important to a poem: its emotion.
The device of ending with a couplet serves him particularly well in the last stanza, where the line "And then the heart replies" suggests a fresh volume of feeling that is left to the reader's imagination. It turns an elegy for lost youth into a near love-poem, and suggests the complexity of the loss, and its difficulty of articulation.
One aspect of the art of rhyme is to avoid grammatical monotony by rhyming varied parts of speech. In the first stanza the grammatical pattern of the rhyme is noun ("cloud"), verb ("vowed") and adjective ("proud"). Such variation is not always followed, but it is always sufficient to create energy in the movement of the verse. In the last stanza, though, Housman rhymes three intransitive verbs – "nighs", "sighs", "replies". The repetition is deliberate. Such verbs create a strong sense of forward movement halted. This is the end of the poem, but Housman wants to say, in effect, there is more, the emotions are still working silently in my heart, though I cannot tell you what they are.
While concerned with the melancholy closure of ageing, the poem conveys in parenthesis the limitlessness of adolescent aspiration. The narrative slows luxuriantly in stanza five, and pauses on the easy confidence of "the air of other summers". But then, all at once, it accelerates. Those awaited summers have arrived, and evaporated, remaining somehow unlived: "They came, and went, and are not …" At this point it's absolutely clear that Housman is not writing in the comfortable afterglow of nostalgia. He is writing about a dark absence of fulfilment, now irredeemably faced in the light of "the only end of age" – to quote a poet who learned much from him, and seems to have been temperamentally similar, Philip Larkin.
Housman was a great classical scholar, and his intimacy with Latin, in particular, dictates the shape of his poetry. He makes our cumbersome language seem graceful, flexible and swift. His enduring popular reputation over the years is partly because of his ability to express emotions of a certain universally appealing kind (The Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since 1896) but also testifies to a remarkable style, both epigrammatic and musical, which produces lyric poems that are simple to remember – and simply memorable.
XXXIX (from Last Poems)
When summer's end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.
The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.
From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.
And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.
The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.
So here's an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer's parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.
AE HOUSMAN