A. E. Housman’s “Easter Hymn”

I’m very fond of the excellent second-tier English poet A. E. Housman (d. 1936), who, along with writing such works as “To an athlete dying young,” from A Shropshire Lad, was a prominent classicist at the University of Cambridge.  The melancholy mood of many of his poems speaks to me.  I’ve even made a minor pilgrimage to his grave.

Housman was an atheist, and sometimes a hostile one.  But he had moments of yearning.  This poem, entitled “Easter Hymn,” captures those feelings of longing for a belief that, in the end, he simply couldn’t muster:

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor 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.