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conscience-stricken air?
    Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
    â€™Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
    In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
    Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
    For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.
    Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
    To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
    But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for all the world to see and stare,
    And they’re haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.
    Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
    And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
    And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
    He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

    It’s hard to imagine two writers more different than Housman and Wilde, but as one critic has said: ‘From Wenlock Edge, one can see as far as Reading Gaol.’ Housman saw it too and, after Wilde’s release, he sent him a copy of
A Shropshire Lad
. He used to say with some pride that Robert Ross, Wilde’s friend, had learned a few of the poems by heart and recited them to Wilde while he was still in gaol.
    The occasion for Wilde’s poem
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
was the hanging of a young soldier who had murdered his sweetheart, a situation Housman would have found familiar. Like Hardy, he was fascinated by hanging. As a boy, Hardy had seen a woman hanged and it haunted him all his life, and in Housman, too, the gallows are always turning up.

Eight O’Clock
    (
from
Last Poems)
    He stood and heard the steeple
    Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
    One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
    It tossed them down.
    Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
    He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
    And then the clock collected in the tower
    Its strength, and struck.

    Another of Housman’s gallows verses reads:
    But fetch the county kerchief
    And noose me in the knot,
    And I will rot.
    The American lawyer Clarence Darrow amended the verse to make it read ‘Fetch the county
sheriff
/ And noose me in the knot’ – and he got several murderers off by emotionally quoting the line to the jury. Housman said that it was partly due to him that Leopold and Loeb (who murdered a boy for kicks in the 1920s) escaped the gallows.

I did not lose my heart
    (
from
More Poems)
    I did not lose my heart in summer’s even,
    When roses to the moonrise burst apart:
    When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,
    In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.
    I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,
    A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;
    That took the sabre straight and took it striking
    And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.

    Death in Housman is an instantaneous thing; his heroes don’t hang about. ‘Shot, so quick, so clean an ending’ is the general pattern. And as wars go, the Zulu Wars and the Boer War, which were Housman’s wars, were pretty hygienic. Wilfred Owen, who lived and died during Housman’s lifetime, told a different sort of truth about war, one which makes it difficult to regard the military element in Housman as little more than a stage setting, a useful prop. When the Great War came, and hundreds of thousands of young men died in battle, it might be thought that Housman would have been particularly affected. In fact, he appears not to have been, and this seems shocking. But poets are not statisticians; to them, one death means more than a thousand. When men are dying like flies, that is what they are dying like.
    Still, life has a terrible way of imitating art, and during the war, Housman’s college, Trinity, was turned into a hospital, so his daily life came to be peopled by the kind of young men he had written about, but whose endings weren’t so quick or so clean.