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| This is part of the underpainting for "Touched," the painting that adorns the hardcover jacket and paperback cover of The Throne of Psyche. If you look at the book image below, you'll see the designers made an interesting change. |
It's a lovely, cool Saturday evening with the birds starting up the twittering machine. I'm a bit sleepy, thanks to waking up to another poem in the night . . . So here's a little poem from The Throne of Psyche for your passing-by pleasure. I must have been thinking of Housman's poem, "With Rue My Heart is Laden," which regrets the loss of golden lads and lasses and ends with rose-lipped girls sleeping under the fields where roses fade. And I definitely was remembering that he fell in love with a classmate, a young man who was a close (but not that close!) friend--and who later married (without inviting poor Housman, alas) and took his bride to India. He died before Housman, and though I said on video at West Chester that he died there, I believe Moses Jackson actually died in Canada... He was a traveling sort of fellow, it seems.
Meanwhile Housman found his reward in holding the Kennedy chair in classics at Cambridge, where he managed to make major contributions to his field. He was not, it must be said, famous for being kind to students and was ruthless about poor scholarship from other scholars of Greek and Latin poetry.
The only other easy-to-miss part of this poem is that line, "For yours is dust, and you are not." I meant for it to work in two ways: that is, Housman is dead and therefore "not" to the living; and he is not dead in the sense that his poems in A Shropshire Lad have managed to allure readers for quite a long time now.
The poem was originally published in Books & Culture.
To have one love for all your life
And it as dear as breath;
To lose the shape of what you loved
In distance, then in death:
Yes, what a funny world it is,
Where this is not the worst
That can happen--and daily does.
The mouth that did not thirst
For yours is dust, and you are not.
Yet heedless of all doom
The children shout immortal joys;
Again the roses bloom.
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| And here is the cover or jacket of The Throne of Psyche with the rather surprising change . . . (Detail from the final picture, "Touched," by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.) Mercer University Press, May 2011, 106 pp. |
