Religion and Politics in Housman

Abstract

Housman was, like Horace, strongly influenced by Lucretius. The troubled wood of Wenlock edge comes from Horace in the first instance, as we have said, but ultimately from Lucretius, who liked to use the verb “laborare” in this way.¹ There might seem to be a departure from strict Lucretianism in the repeated use that Housman makes of religious ideas and symbols in his poetry; but again—like Horace, and indeed, as we have observed, like Lucretius himself—Housman is using these trappings to make a fundamentally antireligious point, namely that death is the end, that there can be no theodicy. Sometimes Housman explicitly attacks religion, and in particular Christianity, as in the famous line in which he curses “whatever brute and blackguard made the world.”² In other poems that have a religious cast, and where religious ideas are apparently employed without ridicule, Housman, as F. W. Bateson remarks, “seems to be utilizing for merely rhetorical purposes a system of religion that he had abandoned long before he wrote them” (p. 141). This is so, for example, in the hymn that he wrote for his own funeral, which I quoted in the last chapter.³ Sometimes, though there is no direct assault, the tone is subtly disrespectful of religion, or mildly blasphemous, as for example in “The Carpenter’s Son,”⁴ with its hint that Christ was homosexual, or “Be still, my soul, be still,”⁵ with its insolent inversion of the biblical use of this phrase.