Beer and Poetry
Rereading a Poem by Housman
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
In the margin next to the first few lines of A. E. Housman’s “Terence, this is stupid stuff,”1 I had listed – and then scratched out lightly for some reason – the following three words stacked atop one another: beer, poetry, friendship. I could have guessed that those first two might be there. Beer or poetry: the two diverging paths in life one would have to choose from, according to Housman.
Or at least that’s what I thought when I was 16 or 17 and first read the poem – a dialogue between a poet named Terence and a friend of his – from 1896. Terence’s friend challenges him in the first line: “this is stupid stuff.” He mocks Terence for drinking his beer slowly and writing melancholy poetry, eventually asking, “come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.” The rest of the poem is Terence’s response: an argument for poetry over booze as the best way to manage in a world with “much less good than ill.”
I’ve never truly forgotten what always seemed to me the clear choice at the heart of this poem: the life of socializing and parties, of ale and even “livelier liquor” on the one hand versus, on the other, a life spent reading literature to “train for ill and not for good” in this world where “luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,” as Terence says. And I think that the understanding of poetry that Terence espouses in the poem – more specifically, the practical role that poetry (and I’d say literature and art more broadly) can play in someone’s real life – has been a large part of my own working, never-fully-articulated belief about why we should read. Or, at least why I read.
That belief is best illustrated by the memorable extended analogy that closes the poem. Terence tells his friend a story about an ancient king named Mithridates. Concerned about nefarious agents potentially poisoning his food and drink, Mithridates microdosed himself with nonlethal but increasing portions of all the poisons he could source in order to develop immunity. In Housman’s version of the story, the plan works. Mithridates withstands multiple attempts on his life. “I tell the tale that I heard told,” Terence says, and concludes: “Mithridates, he died old.”
*
Part of me has never moved on from Housman’s analogy: reading poetry is like taking small portions of poison to protect yourself against all of the difficulties that life will throw at you. In other words, reading just helps you deal with life. The kind of poison Housman means here, I’ve always inferred, can be defined as reading and struggling with good and often difficult works of art, past and present. Poems, novels, short stories, films, music, visual art, and more – any work could be a strengthening microdose of arsenic or strychnine so long as it was serious and honest and didn’t “see the world as the world’s not.”
That – seeing the world as it’s not – is the effect of drinking too much and for misguided reasons, Terence claims. From that first reading back in high school I remember – in addition to learning the proper pronunciation of “victuals” – the humorous parts of the passages in the poem concerning getting drunk, specifically the fact that Mr. Vachon pointed out to us that Terence admits to past nocturnal enuresis. “I was I, my things were wet.” I didn’t see back then that Terence’s argument for literature over beer was actually derived from experience. He tells us that he’s been there before, that he completely understands that you can believe that “malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man.” Because he once did as well, as he reminds us:
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad…
It’s only now that I can appreciate the darkness of this poem. I was too young then to do much more than file away “poetry vs beer” for future use and then to chuckle at the guy who wets himself after falling asleep in the mud on the way home from a big night out. I see now that Terence’s response to his friend’s request to knock it off with the sad-sack poems carries the weight of one who has done his time staring “into the pewter pot” only to wake up and “begin the game anew,” the world remaining “the old world yet” with its share of heartbreak, loss, suffering. All the innovation in Burton-on-Trent can’t solve this fundamental problem of existence for us. Trust me, Terence says, I’ve been through it.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
Keep reading, even “if the smack is sour,” because “the better for the embittered hour.”
*
I hadn’t given a second thought to Mithridates since first reading the poem all those years ago. Even when in the interim I’d check in on the poem or come across it when flipping through an anthology, I’d treat the story as a simple parable Terence uses to make his point to his friend: reading good poetry (the kind that might drive you “moping melancholy mad”) is very much like Mithridatism. I am not a classicist. But Housman was. So he would have known in far greater depth and with true scholarly expertise what I can read about Mithridates of Pontus on Wikipedia today. Notably, that Mithridates gave the order for what came to be known as the Asiatic Vespers of 88 BCE: the massacre of probably 80,000 Romans (Plutarch says 150,000), including men, women, and children, living in Asia Minor.
I realize I am drifting afield from Housman’s poem. But I can’t quite shake the idea that there is some connection between Mithridates’s obsessive and systematic quest for bodily self-preservation on the one hand and, on the other, his violent ruthlessness as a leader warring with the Roman Republic. Wars, massacres, political assassinations: are these not some of the ills of the world that make us moping, melancholy, and mad? And that because of which we need either beer or poetry to get through the day sometimes? So Mithridates can’t truly be the model of how to live well in the world, right? I may be overreading here – but surely Houseman had read all of the primary texts and knew Mithridates’s full profile.
Another thing I am only noticing now, here in midlife, is that Terence does not actually make a choice to abstain completely from beer. He’s still out with his friend, still enjoying some ale, albeit slowly and, apparently, not nearly in the quantities he once did. It’s easy to miss or forget, indeed, as it’s mentioned early (line 4) and then not again. Maybe, after all, it’s not the simple one-path-or-the-other decision I had thought it was. Maybe the answer in this violent world is a little poetry and a little beer.