Last Poems

Housman was an emotionally withdrawn man whose closest friend and lifelong unrequited love Moses Jackson had been his roommate when he was at Oxford in 1877–82.

The introduction to the volume, dated September 1922, explains his rationale: The collection was partly the result of a burst of creativity during 1922, but several earlier poems were gathered into it.

The most notable among these was “Epitaph on an army of mercenaries” (37), which had appeared in The Times (31 October 1917), commemorating the British Expeditionary Force on the third anniversary of the battle of Ypres.

The revised work was eventually published in 1954 as Along the Field: 8 Housman songs; in the meantime, one of the original Shropshire Lad settings was dropped and replaced by two more from Last Poems.

There have also been settings by American composers, of which the earliest was Daniel Gregory Mason’s Songs of the countryside for chorus and orchestra (Op.

Post-war settings include "The night is freezing fast" (1958) by Margarita L. Merriman (b.1927); "We’ll to the woods no more" (1962) by Mayme Chanwai (b. Hong Kong, 1939); "The half moon westers low" (1965) by the American Susan Calvin; "The laws of God, the laws of man" by Joyce Howard Barrell; and "Her strong enchantments failing" (retitled as "The queen of air and darkness"), together with "Eight o’clock", by Elaine Hugh-Jones (2011).