More Poems

Among them was the earnest “The Sage to the Young Man” (4), with its old fashioned forms of address, originally destined for A Shropshire Lad.

[5] Among work taken from old publications, Poem 48 was one of the earliest, having appeared as “Parta Quies”, under his initials only, in Waifs and Strays (March 1881).

“Farewell to name and number” (40) commemorates, not the death of an anonymous soldier but that of Housman's brother George Herbert in October 1901 during the Second Boer War.

It was accordingly printed in the four page sheet with the service order on 4 May 1936, when it was sung in Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge.

[12] Evidence that the poem was written more than a decade before that event is given by the appearance of a translation into Latin alcaics which was published by his colleague Allen Beville Ramsay in Ros Rosarum in 1925.

Already in Later Poems there had appeared “Epithalamium” (24), with its Classical references and form, contiguous to “The Oracles” (25), which has the Battle of Thermopylae as its subject.

[17] Another poem, “Crossing alone the nighted ferry” (23), is based on ancient Greek beliefs about the journey to Hades, the land of death.

Thirty separate settings are due to the enthusiasm of John Ramsden Williamson (1929-2015), who also compiled some into two cycles.