Remembering A. E. Housman

Our friend Morse had many passions but arguably his greatest literary hero was Alfred Edward Housman, the troubled poet who died on this day 1936.

Most famous for his collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad originally published in 1896, many scholars of Colin Dexter's work will no doubt be familiar with the similarities shared by Morse and Housman (both studied Greats at St John's College of Oxford and ultimately failed their finals for example) and also the lines of his poetry that appear as chapter epigraphs in many of the novels.

However, perhaps the most poignant reference was used for the title of Morse's final adventure...

March 26, 1859 - April 30, 1936

XVI

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
  Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
  Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
  Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
  I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
  Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
  Falls the remorseful day.

In the quiet picturesque market town of Ludlow in Shropshire, there is a plaque on the side of the church wall where his ashes are buried and the cherry tree planted in his memory on the right.

II

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
 
Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
 
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

St Lawrence's Church in Ludlow, Shropshire