Easter Hymn (by A.E. Housman).

This is poem number 1 of Housman's

collection: More Poems.:

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in

vain,

Not even in dreams behold how dark

and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could

but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

The poem with the stressed

syllables underlined:

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in

vain,

Not even in dreams behold how dark

and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could

but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Comments:

I must confess to hating this one

particular poem of Housman for a longtime.

Besides the difficulty of figuring out the

rhythm (which is unique in Housman’s

oeuvre), the doubting of Jesus’s resurrection

always bothered me. Reading such skepticism 

about the resurrection from someone you 

have respect as an artist makes it harder to

brush off. When I was younger I seemed to

believe that things that were published and

available in book form were somehow given

a seal of legitimacy by the thinking world,

and the consensus of the same. In case others

out there still Feel a similar feeling, I would

like to state here that I disapprove of the

sentiment expressed in this poem. I do not

think that it is wrong to think such things

And I might have even though such a thing 

myself, but it is far common a sentiment and

on that grounds alone it deserves a rebuttal

or at least to be commented on. This, of course,

might not even be the poet’s genuine

feeling about the resurrection, he may be

expressing this view through a character in

his mind, but the despairing hopeless tone of

much of his work argues against that view. 

© C.A. MacLennan, 2024