When I Was One-and-Twenty (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a writer and instructor at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. In the following essay, Hochman provides biographical information on Housman and discusses whether the reader should consider “When I Was One-and-Twenty” as a “portrait of adolescence” or an “adolescent poem.”

By the time readers reach the end of A. E. Housman’s “When I Was One-and-Twenty” (1895) they will likely be divided into at least two camps: the first comprised of those echoing Housman’s twenty-two year old in an earnest chorus of “’tis true, ’tis true”; and the second, comprised of those that just smile at the earnest repetition of the antique phrase.

The former camp will, more likely than not, be young people well under the age of twenty-one since young people generally give their heart away at a much earlier age than twenty-one. The latter camp will likely be older, and these people have fallen in love. They will find the effusiveness of the poem overwrought and quaintly adolescent. In fact, there has been much critical agreement that Housman was a poet for adolescents, not for adults.

Before joining this critical multitude, however, readers should stop and ask: Is this poem adolescent, or is it better viewed as a portrait of adolescence? To answer, it would behoove readers to realize that Housman, no mere lad, was 36 when he wrote the poem, which was untitled and numbered thirteen in his first collection The Shropshire Lad (1896). Presumably he was experienced in the ways of love and of the disappointment love can bring.

This is confirmed with a little biographical information. Housman met Moses Jackson, a fellow Oxford student, and fell in love with him. Jackson, however, was heterosexual and did not return his feelings. The two, however, would remain friends for most of their lives. In verse published after he died, Housman wrote: “Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say, / It irked you, and I promised / To throw the thought away.” Housman worked and lived together with Jackson until 1886; at that time, Housman moved to another part of London, likely because it was too difficult to live so close to the man he loved. Later, Jackson married and moved away, and it was shortly thereafter that Housman wrote the bulk of his poetry: “I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over.”

If Housman had composed his love poems while experiencing emotional turmoil, the work might have suffered and indeed been merely self-centered — what some people think of as adolescent. But because he waited until he gained perspective on his feelings, it might be more prudent to think his poems transcended the merely personal, and became poems that might be called songs of adolescence — not adolescent songs.

The word lyric comes from lyre, a kind of harp Greek lyrics (singer-poets) they played as they sang. The lyric is a short poem often expressing the sentiments of the poet within stanzas or strophes (pronounced stro-feez). “When I Was One-and-Twenty” is composed of two stanzas or strophes, the second strophe called the antistrophe. The poem is in iambic trimeter (generally, three sets of unaccented and accented syllables per line), and with slight variation, has an abab rhyme scheme. The song-like aspect of the poem fits a poem about adolescence, particularly since the song form has become the most popular form of music for young people — especially those songs with lyrics worshipping or denouncing love.

With this in consideration, it is not surprising that Housman was heavily influenced by the tradition of English ballads first collected in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry(1765), still the most important source of old English ballads. Nor should readers be surprised that more than most poems, Housman’s have been turned into songs by modern songwriters.

Most contemporary criticism is wrong in that it relegates Housman to the status of “minor” and “adolescent” poet. This is not to assert that Housman is a major poet, but only that a dismissal of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” on the grounds it is simple and adolescent seems less interesting than investigating whether the poem maturely expresses, perhaps even pokes fun at, the voice(s) of adolescence. The persona of this poem looks back and understands his ignorance of what it means to give your heart away. The young man now recognizes the truth of the wise man’s advice.

The wise man might be seen as a type, that of the isolated hermit. But it is unlikely the youth is himself an ascetic, and more likely is a young man subject to the temptations of society. After all, how can a vibrant, curious, young person avoid romantic entanglement? With this in mind, is the wise man’s advice unwise or futile? Should the wise man not have said: “You will give your heart away and you will regret it. There is little you can do about it.” But perhaps the wise man was wiser than that and said something else altogether: “Go out and have a wild time (spend lots of money on, and buy lots of jewelry for, your lovers), but stay unattached until you are more experienced in the ways of the world.”

Would this version of the wise man’s advice be useful for Housman himself, a man who devoted himself to unattainable love in a time hostile to homosexuals? This hostility hit home when Housman read about a young cadet who committed suicide over what Housman thought was homosexual desire. And when in 1895 Oscar Wilde was arrested for homosexuality and imprisoned for two years, Housman sent him a present, a copy of The Shropshire Lad.

Because the object of devotion in “When I Was One-and-Twenty” is presumably female — “Give pearls away and rubies” — readers might surmise that this poem is not about a young gay man. But it is more likely that Housman could not, without dire consequences, express homosexual love in a public, and, for safety’s sake had to alter the poetic persona to that of a heterosexual.

If this is a poem about, or greatly influenced by, sexuality, it is no wonder the poem is fatalistic, whether humorously or seriously so. Notice that love is comparable to economic exchange. Love is like money paid for something in return, something beneficial like love, not unpleasant like sorrow.

In the first strophe, money facilitates fun of the sexual kind, and is a positive in that it helps the giver to avoid giving his heart away. In the antistrophe, money is cast as superior to love as a system of exchange, since what one gets in return is pleasure, not heartbreak. Is this true, or is it mock bitterness? Is this an adolescent poem or a poem about adolescence?

While most readers can agree that Housman, through his persona as a young man, is telling the reader that love is hard, is he trying to do more? Is the poem itself a poem of advice, where just as the wise man advises the youth, the youth advises his readers in a poem? And if this is a poem of advice, of what are we being advised? Is the youth sincerely telling us to never fall in love (a truly adolescent poem)? Is the youth mocking the futility of the knowledge that love hurts since one can hardly avoid falling in love (a more mature poem)? Or is it possible that the young reader is advised by both the wise man and the youth to go out and enjoy sexual involvement and leave emotional involvement and commitment for later (a poem about adolescence, and for both adolescents and adults)?

While this reading might seem a typical one to come out of the end of the twentieth century — an era of omnipresent sex and uncloseted homosexuality — there is, perhaps, one thing missing from the wise man’s advice that could update Housman’s “When I Was One-and-Twenty” for the end of the second millennium. It is this: while youth should have a good time and keep their fancies free they must also remember to protect themselves.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Housman rose to fame as one of England’s preeminent poets on the basis of just one book, A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896 and in print continuously throughout the past century. Included along with this poem are such standards of literature anthologies as “To An Athlete Dying Young,” “Loveliest of Trees,” and “Terrence, This IS Stupid Stuff.”
• The Letters of A. E. Housman were edited and compiled by Henry Maas and published by Rupert Hart-Davis of London in 1971. To those even somewhat familiar with the poet’s biography, cutting past things written about him and going straight to his words can be amusing, although those completely unfamiliar with his life will find these friendly but reserved letters irrelevant.
• In 1929, D. C. Somervell published the now-classic English Thought in the Nineteenth Century; it was published ten times in Great Britain before the first American edition in 1965. The book is not large or unduly complex, but very clear in following one social trend after another, right up to the end of the century, to the world Housman inhabited.
• A very good literary analysis of Housman’s work in general is B.J. Leggett’s 1978 study, The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman: Theory and Practice, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The author is a very perceptive Housman scholar; in particular, his line-by-line study of “When I Was One-and-Twenty” in a chapter titled “Songs of Innocence and Experience” is well-researched and clear, if slightly dry intellectually.
• One can get a good sense of the social pressures that affected the poet and (only slightly) cramped his subject matter from reading F. M. L. Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900. Housman came at the very end of the Victorian era, too late to enjoy any of its splendor but in tome to suffer from its narrow-minded stuffiness. Thompson’s book divides Victorian life by general categories, such as “Work,” “Childhood,” “Marriage,” “Homes and Houses,” making it easy to compare similar elements from our own world.
• Tom Burns Haber edited the centennial edition of Housman’s poetry and wrote a 1967 biography entitled A. E. Housman. Of all of the Housman biographies available, this one is of particular interest to the student because it focuses most of its attention in the relationships between his life and particular poems. Casual readers might be bored with his explanations of how specific lines changed from their first written manuscript form to their publication, but writers and those familiar with the writing process will understand the significance of each minor correction.