"With Rue My Heart Is Laden"

 

The older I get, the more the poems of A.E. Houseman speak to me.  Heading this post is a portion of one if them which speaks all too loudly.

In a way, this regard is unsurprising.  The poems involve loss, death, memory, regret; the stuff of life now, or a good part of it.  There's none of the sang-froid one can find in Horace or Wallace Stevens, though. With Horace, there was an acknowledgement of loss and the inevitability of death, but this served as an invitation to enjoy the life we live.  Stevens' poems seem to evoke a chilly resignation to and acceptance of that inevitability as simply what we have--a part of the real, the world, we're part of, which may become art, and thereby something of value.  Houseman's evocation of them is raw, but summoned through spare, simple language which is itself raw in a sense, and can leave one feeling raw.

I despise regret and remorse because they seem completely futile.  More than anything else I can think of, they epitomize what Stoicism and practical wisdom warn against--disturbing yourself over matters outside your control.  There's nothing more beyond our control than what took place in the past.  At best, we can correct or mitigate or errors or missteps.  More accurately, I hate myself for feeling regret and remorse, when they serve no purpose but self-torment.  But feel them I do, and the feeling is strong, sometimes.

In waking life regret is a passing concern and can be overwhelmed like so much else by the rush of the simple, insignificant things of life.  But in dreams regret and loss are experienced directly.  They can be the dream, in fact.  Sometimes the dream reflects and involves useless efforts to make things as they should gave been, to be what you should have been.  The worst dreams can be those in which you struggle, uselessly, to be with someone you wish to be with but cannot be with, now or ever.  Such dreams evoke regret which will outlive the dream.  It lingers.

Some of Houseman's poems describe this kind of regret in a very powerful way, and do so in stark language without embellishment, though sometimes by implication, which in his case may have been necessary given the prejudices of that time.  But the regret expressed is nonetheless unfiltered as if in a dream.  And lingers.