The return of Housman's muse

It is now time to return to the main thread of the narrative and observe what was happening to the poetic thread in Housman's life. In 1900 Housman's muse returned.

Five years had elapsed since he had sent A Shropshire Lad for publication. Between 1900 and 1905 he experienced a new surge of poetic activity that produced twenty-six poems. Between 1917 and 1922 he wrote another eighteen. In 1922 he had a total of forty-four new poems. He would eventually include only seventeen of them in Last Poems.

Four of them were soldier poems, Grenadier, Lancer, The Deserter, and Astronomy reflecting the impact of the Boer war on his choice of subject matter in the years 1899 to 1902. Astronomy was evidently biographical and related to his brother Herbert killed in that war: factually, he was not in a poetic drought, whatever he might say to other people.

Housman and his stepmother

Long letters he sent to his stepmother reflect his wish to entertain her. The effort he put into them showed his need for a continuing mother figure, even a stepmother. In September 1904 he wrote vividly about his visit to Constantinople, about Turkish graveyards and tombstones, which made ‘the downs look as if they were sprinkled with large hailstones or coarse grained salt’. His sunsets were atmospheric:

He went on at length about animals he saw, white oxen, black buffaloes and sheep,