Today’s Poem: Simple Is Hard

Two short verses by A.E. Housman

Edvard Munch, Cherry Tree in Blossom, 1905 (Wikimedia)

With Rue My Heart Is Laden

by A.E. Housman

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

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To understand why formalist poets find themselves drawn back to A.E. Housman (1859–1936) again and again — and again and again — you have to understand 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 grasping 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.

Think of one of Housman’s best-known poems, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” (1896). It starts as a spring poem, the cherry trees in bloom, “Wearing white for Eastertide.” Yet a mention of time and aging in the second of the poem’s three tetrameter quatrains turns the thought into winter verses. Because the narrator will live at best another fifty years, the cherry trees in spring are not enough — and so “About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.” That’s a fairly complex thought, but Housman, as always, makes it seem simple.

“The Oracles” is another complex thought — maybe, along with “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” Housman’s densest argument — somehow rendered in simple form. But consider the first of Today’s Poems. “With Rue My Heart Is Laden” puts a very simple thought: The joys of youth do not last, and everything we perceive descends to dust. The difficulty isn’t in the idea; it’s in the execution. And in eight lines of trimeter, the half-meter that suggests ballad form without the extra foot — rhymed abab with a feminine ending in the a rhymes — Housman puts the thought in lines so straightforward that we miss the incredible artistry needed to keep the verse simple.

A.E. Housman in 1894 (Wikimedia)

Or take “Here Dead Lie We,” the second of Today’s Poems. In March, we discussed the form of the epigram, the shape of certain short poems in English. In the technical sense developed there, “With Rue My Heart Is Laden” is not an epigram. It’s just a short poem, a miniature. “Here Dead Lie We,” a single tetrameter quatrain with strong abab rhymes, however, clearly is an epigram. And the idea developed in the poem is complex: The graves of soldiers speak of those who chose to risk their lives rather than be shamed in their native land. From the grave they (or the older, more cynical poet) recognize that the sacrifice was not all that much: “Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose.” And then, in the wrenching turn, they add, “But young men think it is, and we were young.” That “and we were young” is simple, perfect: a well-made wooden box clicking shut. And as difficult a feat to pull off as poetry allows.

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Here Dead Lie We

by A.E. Housman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

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