Housman, Homosexuality, And Love

Analysis of the works of the poet A.E. Housman, and how they relate to the experience of love as a homosexual.

I must confess that in writing, and allowing others to read what I write, I fear that I may be giving the wrong image, that by writing on one subject to often I may appear as something I am not. I don’t want to sound like a broken gay record, focusing too frequently on that subject, but in writing it is necessary to operate from what you know. The art of writing is done from a perspective that is experiential, and my experiences in life deal with my orientation frequently, in one way or another. What ratifies me in writing about homosexuality is that often when someone learns that I am gay they have questions, and I always answer them courteously, directly and with as much knowledge as I can give them. To do anything else would be disrespectful to those people asking me the questions and to those people that share my orientation, for to misrepresent myself is to simultaneously misrepresent them, for often people don’t know many gay people, nor a gay person that they can ask rather intimate questions.

So I will continue with that topic in mind, and risk again appearing as something that I am not, yet with a slight twist. As I said it is not frequent that any given person knows someone who is gay that they can ask intimate questions of, but in learning about any unfamiliar topic one should attempt to use any and all resources to gather information. With that in mind we turn to the true topic of this analysis. That of the poet, A.E. Housman, who was once a very popular English writer, but who is now left out of popular literature. Yet it is Housman, more than Whitman or Ginsberg, who provides some of the greatest insight into what I think is appropriate to call the gay experience. It is widely believed that Housman was a homosexual and that his only love in life was a school friend named Moses Jackson who never reciprocated, and who may have never known of, the affection Hosman felt for him. It seems that this had an incredible amount of influence on his writings.

In poetry it is likely that there is no greatest. Certainly there are those poets that have the widest circulation or the greatest technical prowess in writing, but to name the greatest poet seems to be a vain adventure. One should only concern themselves with their favorite poet, and as in all writing it is best to find an author or a writer that speaks to something in you. Be it a feeling, a way of thinking, or shared experience, finding a commonality between what the writer is saying and yourself will produce a feeling that you have found the greatest. This is how I feel with Housman and his poems. They speak to how I have felt in my life and what I have experienced regarding unreciprocated love. But I think the audience of Housman is far more than homosexuals that have fallen in love with people that can never love them back, but anyone who has ever been in love with someone that doesn’t love them as much as hoped, or even people that have met great hardships when it comes to affection. Housman’s poems read as having been written by someone who spent a lifetime dealing with unreciprocated love, which is likely, and it is that theme of unreciprocated love that permeates much of his work. Housman can provide, as a poet with his fixed body of work, insight into the experience of homosexuals regarding love.

In discussing Housman it is necessary to give the common evidence of his orientation. The most common being a poem he wrote, known simply as “Because I Liked You Better”:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
`Good-bye,' said you, `forget me.'
`I will, no fear', said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.

Truly, the sole evidence in this poem is in the first sentence when he says, “Because I liked you better/ Than suits a man to say.” Now it is possible that my analysis is being influenced by my belief that Housman was a homosexual, and that line can simply be hyperbole, with no romantic overtones; but when combined with the sixth line it couldn’t be anything else. “We parted, stiff and dry;”, now this line can be read with a sexual tone, implying the male anatomy, and no sexual contact. Once again this could be hyperbole, but likely such things would not have even been implied in the 17^th century, in Victorian Era England.

In this particular poem, several of the themes that are often visited in Housman’s poems are showcased: these being unreciprocated love, distance, and assurance in how one feels. We have already touched on unreciprocated love, and this can be most visibly highlighted in the third line when Housman describes how his affection “irks” the person he is speaking of. Distance is often implied and in this poem in the fifth and sixth lines when he writes “To put the world between us/ We parted, stiff and dry.” Yet Housman describes in the final stanza that this distance does not affect the affection he feels, but instead ratifies it, making it purer with the loyalty to the unnamed other. “Halt by the headstone naming/ The heart no longer stirred,/ And Say the lad that loved you/ Was one that kept his word.”

The themes of distance and assurance in feeling are further explained in “Shake Hands, We Shall Never Be Friends:”

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;
I only vex you the more I try.
All's wrong that ever I've done or said,
And nought to help it in this dull head:
Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye.

But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,
Be good to the lad that loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you,
And whistle and I'll be there.

Unreciprocated love can be found in the second, third, and fourth lines when he describes the feeling of vexation the person he cares for feels, and then how everything he does is seen as being wrong to this other. Distance comes in with the first and then fifth lines, with what seems to be an amicable farewell as the two people “shake hands” and then with the pronouncement that they “shall never be friends.” And again we see this assurance in feeling, this loyalty in the face of unreciprocated love, these ideas being the exclusive topic in the second stanza. “And whistle and I’ll be there,” seems to summarize it fairly well in a single line, the devotion to a person that may feel no devotion to the speaker.

These three feelings are feelings that I am fairly certain now are very much a part of the gay experience. From simple statistics it is more than likely that at one point in their lives most gay people will have romantic feelings for someone who is heterosexual, and that these feelings will be exclusively one way. From this, one may wish to create distance between themselves and their object of affection, yet this distance cannot diminish the depth of feeling this person forces them to feel, for even at this point every action in their life is being made for the sake of another. And from this combination of unreciprocated love and distance comes this assurance in feeling. This assurance of feeling can be compared to fortitude in a way, in the emotion and the thought that no matter the distance and no matter how the other person feels you will love them in spite of their apathy for you. Housman reads, to me, as a person who dealt with such things for most of his life, which likely makes him an expert on such topics. His insight into the gay experience, from this romantic near sexual perspective, is of great use for people trying to understand themselves and others better. But one cannot solely do this by simply reading a few lines of nearly one hundred year old poetry. One must shake their perspective, and put themselves out side of their own lives for a moment as they stumble upon a feeling or a thought in poems such as Housman’s. No easy task, for any person.

For Further Reading

• “When I Watch the Living Meet” From “A Shropshire Lad”
• “When I was One and Twenty” From “A Shropshire Lad”
• “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner With the Handcuffs on His Wrists” From “Additional Poems”
• “He Would Not Say For Me” From “Additional Poems”

Author's Note

Is this analysis accurate? Does the evidence I provide relate and support the arguments I make? Is my point clear?