A Landscape of the Mind

I've recently re-read A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad," a slim volume of poems published in 1896. What a wonderful gift to English literature!

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

is hung with bloom along the bough,

and stands about the woodland ride

wearing white for Eastertide.

Poem II.
Housman (1859-1936), the elder brother of Laurence Housman, the playwright and artist, wrote very little poetry. Then, in 1895, aged 36, he had a sudden burst of creative energy. This book is the result. It's full of the great themes of life and death, of war and peace. It appears to be very simple, almost like primitive poetry, but on closer inspection Housman's work weaves together Classical themes, archaic language, and metres taken from old country balladry. The poems have a slow, yet relentless rhythm; they touch on most of the major themes of life. Rustic and earthy, homespun yet elegant, they create a vista that is both wonderfully attractive and unutterably sad. Shropshire, for Housman, becomes a landscape of the mind, an idealised country haven far from the arid streets of London where
"...till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill." (Poem XLI)
Housman was a native of Worcestershire, not of Shropshire. Nevertheless, in the poems he uses the place names and history of Shropshire to conjure up the hilarity of Ludlow Fair, the wind on Bredon Hill, the swift-flowing Teme and the stately Severn. The Shropshire of Housman's mind is a place where young lads fall in love, then go away to fight Victoria's wars. It's a place where lovers lie down together, but death soon steals them. In a profusion of narrative and evocative language, Housman creates a place that does not change, where the Wrekin hill still looks down, impassivly on the emotions of man, where the vane on Hughley steeple still stands bright against the sky.
It's hard to choose a favorite, but if I have to, I'll go for
Poem XIX - To An Artist Dying Young.
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Housman’s imagery is stark in its intensity: once the hero was carried high in victory; now he is carried shoulder-high, in a coffin. Whereas once his achievements were lauded by the living, now he can only share his glory with the shades. But there’s still more to the poem. The warning to a man, not to let his name die before he does, and the image of the garland, briefer than a girl’s, remain after the narrative has ceased. Therein lies Housman's true genius. He is not just recreating an antique land of the imagination, he is populating it with people just like us, people for whom the themes of love and death are just as pertinent. We, too, know the pain of loss, the nostalgia for things past.
In one poem, XLVII 'The Carpenter's Son,' Housman speaks of Christ. In his words, I do not sense the devotion of one who has known the soul-satisfying embrace of saving faith. His words are respectful, yet a little cold. In the fifth verse, Christ speaks:
Here hang I, and right and left
Two poor fellows hang for theft:
All the same’s the luck we prove,
Though the midmost hangs for love.

Of course, Housman is right, Christ dies for love, yet in the poem it is a strangely ineffectual love. There is nothing of salvation. We feel sorry for the crucified One. Christ's only advice, repeated twice is merely "Live, lads, and I will die."

I think this could be the clue to the whole work. Housman longs for another country, a fairer land, so he invents Shropshire, a landscape of the mind. He is actually searching for heaven, for the place where he will enjoy peace with God, reconciled with his Maker through the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

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.
Poem XL

We wade through the melancholy and the nostalgia. We weep with him at the sight of a loved one leaving whom he shall meet no more. His loneliness and sense of loss are, at times painfully intense. He speaks for us, restless and homesick, until we find our rest in Him, until we come home to God.

Uniform Justice

Just finished reading "Uniform Justice" by Donna Leon. It's about a murder investigation in modern Venice, written by an American who has lived in that city for 25 years. The central character is an investigator called Commisario Guido Brunetti (why can't English names sound so good?) I'll not go into the details of the story, but a young man is found dead, in a shower. It looks like a suicide, but it's not. Gradually a web of corruption is uncovered. Of course, the bad guys are the pseudo-fascist military. The story ends with no clear resolution. You can almost hear the author laying down her manuscript with a sigh.

There's only one mention of the church in the book, near the beginning, where it is dismissed, contmptuously, in the same breath as the government. Elsewhere, Brunetti obseves, to himself, that there is more chance of a religious revival than of the eradication of corruption in Rome. In another place, his wife asks him if he can think of any redeeming features in the military. His feeble response is that the military encourages discipline in young people. This, she dismisses as fatuous nonsense. There is no sense of pride in the military, or of the concept of national defense.

Worst of all, there is no real hope for justice. Brunetti is sidelined from his main job in order to massage statistics that will make it look like crime in Venice is declining. He knows full well that this is not the case, but he needs to appease a stereotypical arrogant, ignorant, and politically motivated superior. As Brunetti spends time finding ways to call black white and white black, blind justice lies bleeding.

It's not a bad book. The prose is elegant; the setting is both nostalgic and beautiful. But the characters inhabit a world that is slowly sinking into the Venetian mud. They live lives of quiet despair. Without absolutes, there is no uniform justice. If you want evidence of societal decay, look no further. Venice is a fitting metaphor for a culture without foundations, a civilisation without hope.

Maison Dieu

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a rather strange website. www.28dayslater.co.uk/ It's run by a group of urban explorers in the UK, although there are occasional postings from elsewhere. These people are not interested in vandalism, but in recording history before it is lost. They have a slogan "Take nothing with you, leave only footprints." As a former archaeology student (many moons ago) I find it fascinating to see the stages of decay in various buildings. It makes you understand what some of the much older sites must have gone through before they became piles of rubble. Some of the photographs posted are incredibly beautiful.


Others are incredibly sad. Hospital wards which have witnessed so much human drama lie empty and forgotten. Schools, whose hallways once echoed with the cries of countless children, are abandonned to the elements. And churches, where generations of the faithful participated in worship and in the rites of passage, no longer resound with praise.

Maison Dieu Church, which, until the early 1980's housed a congregation of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, is a landmark in Brechin, Scotland.
It was designed by George Washington Browne and built between 1890 and 1891. Browne designed many homes in Scotland, several churches, a few banks, and the operating theatres in the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Many of his buildings have octagonal belfries.


According to those who recently investigated the church, the building is in poor condition. It has numerous leaks and is infested by pigeons. Apparently, when they gained access there was a huge clamor as hundreds of pigeons took flight and started circling inside the sanctuary. The floors are carpeted with feathers and droppings. The smell is almost unbearable. This is what the house of God looks like only 118 years after it was built.





We have the misfortune, or the opportunity (depending on how you look at it) to live in an era in which the tide of faith is ebbing. Abandonned churches, like Maison Dieu, bear silent testimony to the decline of the Gospel in Western Europe. The photographs are sobering, an affront to those of us who spend our lives seeking to advance the Kingdom, a slight on the name of God.





In Old Testament days, when the exiles returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, they lived for many years in sight of the ruined temple. They repaired their homes and workplaces, but the house of God remained as a haunt for wild foxes and birds of prey. It took a spiritual revival, under Ezra and Nehemiah, for the people to be galvanised into action. Perhaps it will take a revival before we rise up and rebuild the house of the Lord.





The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Matthew Arnold 1822-1888