'I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.
' 'Forgive me. I?I?have mourned so long in silence?in silence. . . . You were with him?to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . . ' ' 'To the very end,' I said shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . . ' I stopped in a fright. ' 'Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. 'I want?I want? something?something?to?to live with.'
'I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'
' 'His last word?to live with,' she insisted. 'Don't you understand I loved him?1 loved him?1 loved him!'
'I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
' 'The last word he pronounced was?your name.'
'I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an
exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it?I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark?too dark altogether. . . .'7
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. 'We have lost the first of the ebb,' said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky?seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
1898-99 1899,1902
7. Writing to William Blackwood (editor of Blackwood's Magazine, where the story first appeared) in May 1902, Conrad referred to 'the last pages of Heart of Darkness where the interview of the man and the girl locks in?as it were?the whole 30,000 words of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life, and makes of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa' (Joseph Conrad, Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn, 1958).
.
1948
A. E. HOUSMAN 1859-1936 Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire (close to the Shropshire border), and attended school at the nearby town of Bromsgrove. He studied classics and philosophy at Oxford and in 1881 shocked his friends and teachers by failing his final examinations (he was at the time in a state of psychological turmoil resulting from his suppressed homosexual love for a fellow student). He obtained a civil service job and pursued his classical studies alone, gradually building up a reputation as a great textual critic of Latin literature. In 1892 he was appointed to the chair of Latin at University College, London, and from 1911 until his death he was professor of Latin at Cambridge.
Housman's classical studies consisted of meticulous, impersonal textual investigations; both his scholarship and his life were reserved and solitary. Yet his feeling for literature ran strong and deep, and in his lecture 'The Name and Nature of Poetry' (1933) he says that poetry should be 'more physical than intellectual,' having a skin- bristling, spine-shivering effect on the reader. His own poetry was limited both in quantity and in range, but?stark, lucid, elegant?it exemplifies the 'superior terseness' he prized in verse. Two 'slim volumes'?A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922)?were all that appeared during his lifetime, and after his death his brother Laurence brought out another small book, More Poems (1936).
As a poet Housman aimed not to expand or develop the resources of English poetry but by limitation and concentration to achieve an utterance both compact and moving. He was influenced by Greek and Latin lyric poetry, by the traditional ballad, and by the lyrics of the early-nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine. His favorite theme is that of the doomed youth acting out the tragedy of his brief life; the context is agricultural activity in England, with the land bearing visual reminders of humanity's long history. Nature is beautiful but indifferent and is to be enjoyed while we are still able to enjoy it. Love, friendship, and conviviality cannot last and may well result in betrayal or death, but are likewise to be relished while there is time. Wryly ironic in tone, stoic in temperament, Housman sounds a note of resigned wisdom with quiet poignancy. He avoids self-pity by projecting emotion through an imagined character, notably the 'Shropshire lad,' so that even the first-person poems seem to be distanced in some degree. At the same time the poems are distinguished from the 'gather ye rosebuds' (or carpe diem) tradition by the undertones of fatalism and even doom.
Loveliest of Trees
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
5 Now, of my threescore years and ten.
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
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To AN ATHLET E DYING YOUNG / 194 9 10And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. 1896 When I Was One-and-Twenty 5When I was one-and-twenty 1 heard a wise man say, 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.' But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. 1015When I was one-and-twenty 1 heard him say again, 'The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.'? And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true. repentance 1896 To an
