April soft and cold: Nothing much to lose

Time to look at another poem about what was known as The Great War (until people realized they were going to have to start numbering these cataclysmic conflicts). And today I’m going with one from A. E. Houseman.

Last year I shared with you one of my all-time favorite poems, from anyone, ever: Housman’s “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”. It’s long(ish), but delivers a serious punch. In “Here Dead We Lie”, Houseman packs every bit as powerful a blow, distilled down into the smallest of space.

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

At the time of the war’s outbreak, Housman was in his mid-fifties, and a professor of Latin at University College, London. (He was also an atheist. When a very rare original 1535 Coverdale Bible was discovered in the college library, Housman suggested that it would be better to sell it and “buy some really useful books with the proceeds.”) So there was no question that he would serve, and he did not.

However, the man who wrote the immensely popular A Shropshire Lad poems before ever setting foot in, you know, Shropshire, is not incapable of envisioning what he hasn’t yet experienced.

“Here Dead We Lie” dates from 1914, when the armies along the Western Front had just had the experience(s) of charging headlong—multiple times—into massed rifle and machinegun fire, with soldiers dying in their thousands, and without the noticeable gain of much territory. During these melees, some men turned and ran, often to be shot by officers to the rear. Housman may be referring in the first stanza to those who kept going forward out of a sense of honor or duty—to die rather than engender shame for their loved ones—even though there was clearly no hope of tactical value to the sacrifice.

But if so, he turns it around in the last stanza, where he speaks of the high price of choosing the path to death (for whatever reasons). If those four lines don’t tear your heart out, then it’s probable that you don’t have one.