Terence's "Stupid Stuff": Depressing Themes in A.E. Housman's Poetry

One of Housman's best-known poems is "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff," an often reprinted piece from the 1896 volume A Shropshire Lad. In the poem one of the fellows down at the pub has found Terence's poems far too depressing and has said so loudly and in public:

"But oh, Good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
Terence, who represents Housman's point of view in the poem, goes on to defend the value of his depressing poetry, but there is no question about it. To the sensitive reader Terence's verse may not be "stupid," but it most certainly is fairly described as depressing. Reading through the 1896 volume, one encounters poem after poem on such depressing themes as the brevity of human life, the powerlessness of individuals, and the fragility or even worthlessness of human love.

To begin with, there are the poems about how short our lives are. In "Loveliest of Trees" a late winter snowstorm has ruined the cherry blossoms of early spring, but the speaker plans to go riding through the snow anyway because we get so few springs to enjoy in our short lives that to waste even one of them is too wasteful indeed. In " With Rue My Heart Is Laden" the speaker says his heart is loaded with sorrow as he remembers the many "rose-lipt" maidens and "lightfoot" lads who have already died. In "Bredon Hill" the poet tells the sad tale of the premature death of the girl he planned to marry. In "Shot? So Quick, So Clean An Ending" Terence relates the bitter story of a young man who put a pistol to his head and ended it all. Even the most famous piece in the 1896 volume, "To An Athlete Dying Young," is about the brevity of life. In that poem the speaker laments the death of the young hero-athlete at the height of his physical strength. Clearly Housman's verse has a somber tone.

Another depressing notion found in the 1896 poems is the powerlessness of ordinary individuals to affect their own fate. "1887," for example, is a poem about the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coronation in which the ordinary lads of Shropsire -- the locale of Housman's poems -- are depicted as the soldiers who have died in Asia and Africa. God may save the Queen, the poet says, but those soldiers could not save themselves. In "On the Idle Hill of Summer" the powerlessness of the ordinary soldier comes up again:

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Ordinary lads are also depicted as powerless before the law. In "On Moonlight Heath and Lonesome Bank" the speaker meditates about a comrade who will be hanged in Shrewsbury Prison on the next morning:
And naked to the hangman's noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.

And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land.

Of course such poems would trouble the good old boys down at the pub.

Perhaps the bitterest of the themes in the 1896 poems is seen in poems like "When I Was One and Twenty." In that poem the speaker has learned that true love is probably a fiction and that one cannot count on love to ease one's pain in this troubled world. In "There Pass the Careless People, " we see that same theme again:

His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.

True love is a fiction, and only fools give their hearts away. That's really depressing!

Our lives are short, we have no real choice but must accept our fate, and even love's a lie! Over and over, Terence harps on those themes. Or, to put it another way, Housman harps on those themes. No matter how sensitive we are to the truths behind the poetry, we can understand why the boys in the pub would rather drink than listen to Terence's -- or Housman's -- "stupid stuff."