Today’s Poem: Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

Irony in A.E. Housman

Hans Holbein the Younger, Battle Scene, c. 1620 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

by A.E. Housman

These, in the days when heaven was falling, 
The hour when earth’s foundations fled, 
Followed their mercenary calling 
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; 
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; 
What God abandoned, these defended, 
And saved the sum of things for pay. 
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When Poems Ancient and Modern looked at A.E. Housman (1859–1936) this past spring, we suggested that admiration for the poet begins with grasping one of the most disturbing rules of art: Simple is hard.

It ought not to be so, we tend to feel. Isn’t the complex what takes work? We write difficult poetry because the thoughts we’re presenting are hard to work through and express. What every serious writer eventually discovers, however, is that simplicity of grammar and expression, the ease we afford readers in following a thought, takes a whole lot of work and rarely succeeds. Simple is hard. And Housman had a talent, perhaps the greatest in the history of English poetry, for making difficult verse look easy.

A similar point was made in August when we looked at “To an Athlete Dying Young,” where Housman takes a common thought about faded glory — not particularly deep and possibly not true — and expresses it more neatly than any one else.

A.E. Housman in 1894 (Wikimedia Commons)

In Today’s Poem, however, we see Housman writing something more complex. “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” (1917) runs on irony, but the irony is used not to diminish something thought noble but to elevate something thought ignoble. A pair of Housman’s typically precise tetrameter quatrains — rhymed abab, with a feminine a rhyme — present the ironic distance between the heroic language of grand myth and the flatness of commercial monetary terms: such lines as “Their shoulders held the sky suspended” ironically set against such lines as “And took their wages and are dead.”

Housman’s success can be measured by, say, Hugh MacDiarmid’s simplistic 1935 answer poem, “Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” — which rages against mercenaries: “They were professional murderers and they took / Their blood money and impious risks and died.” The irony in Housman begins with the biblical and prayer-book language uses to describe the actions of hired soldiers. In just eight lines, however, Housman turns that verbal irony itself into the stuff of tragedy and cosmic purpose: “What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay.”

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