More of the Lad

THE MANUSCRIPT POEMS OF A. E. HOUSMAN (146 pp.)--Edited by Tom Burns Haber--University of Minnesota Press ($4.50).

A. E. Housman once said that he had to blot poetry out of his mind while shaving because the thought of a fine line made his skin bristle and stopped his razor short. Housman put most of his own skin-prickling stanzas into A Shropshire Lad ("When I was one and twenty"), published in 1896 at his own expense when he was seven and thirty. This collection of unpublished poems will halt no razors. They are shavings of another sort, poetic chips and fragments from four notebooks Housman left behind at his death in 1936, which have already been combed for previous posthumous collections.

Though they bear the mark of the poet's workbench, with words missing or a choice of words still undecided--as, for instance, between decay and worn away--most of the poems nonetheless lilt their way through the favorite Housman themes of love, war, death, courage, the transient beauty of life and the ironies of loving and leaving it. As ever, Housman is chiefly the laureate of youth. (Critic Cyril Connolly once pointed out that in 63 poems, Housman used the word "lad" 67 times.) If few of the lines from the Manuscript are memorable, they are all refreshingly unobscure, and the quatrains sing:

Ay, kiss your girl and then forget her;

'Tis like the brave:

They love the leaden bullet better

To lie with in the grave.

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