FABLES and analogies serve very well instead of the psychological jargon that would otherwise have to be used in a discussion of the poet’s mental clockwork, but they must be supported wherever possible by definite instances, chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed of how easily and completely the poet can deceive his readers once he has assumed control of their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily subject.

Turn then to Mr. Housman’s classic sequence “A Shropshire Lad,” to No. XLVII “The Carpenter’s Son,” beginning, “Here the hangman stops his cart.” Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily many) how long it took them to realize what the poet is forcing on them there. In nine cases out of ten where this test is applied, it will be found that the lyric has never been consciously recognized as an Apocryphal account of the Crucifixion; and even those who have consciously recognized the clues offered have failed to formulate consciously the further daring (some would say blasphemous) implications of its position after the last three pieces “Shot, lad? So quick, so clean an ending,” “If it chance your eye offend you” and the momentary relief of “Bring in this timeless grave to throw.”

Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, cricket, football; a rustic murder; the London and North Western Railway; the Shropshire Light Infantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the ringing of church bells; and then this suicide by shooting, no reader is prepared for the appearance of the historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has only to call the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call His disciples “Lads” instead of “My Brethren” or “Children,” and we are completely deceived.

In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in this context lies, I believe, the intended irony of the poem which is strewn with the plainest scriptural allusions.

In justification of the above and of my deductions about “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in a later section I plead the rule that “Poetry contains nothing haphazard,” which follows naturally on the theory connecting poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate a personal significance—a cypher that can usually be decoded from another context.