In 1886 a fellow by the name of A. E. Housman was in a bind. It turned out that his poems were too depressing to publish! To give you some idea, I paged through the collection and took note of his subjects:

1. Soldiers dying for their country,
2. Youth and springtime are too short to enjoy,
3. Young men marching off to war,
4. Failed flirtation,
5. Unrequited love,
6. Lovers quarreling and breakup,
7. Farmers will die one day,
8. A man kills his brother,
9. And then hangs from the gallows,
10. Love ignored,
11. Alienation from others,
12. Playing cricket with a broken heart

(sharp inhale)

13. An athlete dying young,
14. A passing soldier is never to be seen again,
15. Dying before marriage,
16. Young men will die,
17. Betrayal in love,
18. Warfare,
19. Romantic rejection causing enlistment as a soldier,
20. Childhood lost,
21. London is awful,
22. Admiring a suicide,
23. Offerings for a dead friend,

… and closing out with:

24. Loose women,
25. The curative power of the grave,
26. Roman ruins,
27. Living in exile,
28. A ghost watches his beloved live her life,
29. Soldiers dying (again),
30. Fickleness of friendship,
31. Suicides buried outside the churchyard,
32. Etcetera.

Housman was forced to self-publish the collection (titled A Shropshire Lad) after being rejected by publishers. Fortunately for him, the Second Boer War was just around the corner and promptly roused the nation’s appetite for awfully bleak poems about young men dying abroad, and a decade or so later WWI rolled along to cement this place in the canon.

The combination of his newfound popularity and generally glum attitude made him an easy target for parodies — take for example Ezra Pound in Mr. Housman’s Message:

O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.

Or Dorothy Parker’s:

I never see that prettiest thing—
A cherry bough gone white with Spring—
But what I think, “How gay t’would be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”

Still, Housman had an answer ready. My favorite poem in A Shropshire Lad comes right at the end: “Terence, this is stupid stuff.” It’s a dialogue between two friends; one of them is a not-so-subtle stand-in for Housman’s critics, who chides his friend for writing reams of poetry on the most miserable of subjects. The other, of course, is a super cool and snarky self-insert who delivers a perfectly witty riposte.

First the friend:

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”

Then the comeback:

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Now Terence softens, and starts giving his defense of darkness in art. The world is a difficult place, and we have to prepare ourselves for its troubles:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

He ends with a particularly powerful image: the metaphor of mithridatism. Mithridates was an ancient king who, to avoid being poisoned, ingested ever-increasing doses of poison to build immunity. Like him, we can sample fractions of darkness ourselves through art until we are strong enough to face the slings and arrows of fate. The poet is not a slave to entertain us with wishes and fantasies, but a mentor who shares some ills of the world — who toughens us up until we can take everything life throws at us.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

BTFO.