As into the garden Elizabeth ran,
Pursued by the just indignation of Anne,
She stepped on on an object that lay in her road;
She stepped on an object that looked like a toad.
It looked like a toad, and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was;
And after supporting Elizabeth's tread
It looked like a toad unaffectedly dead.
Elizabeth, leaving her footstep behind,
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind;
And Anne in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive -
Was heard to arrive, for the neighbourhood rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang,
As her breath on the breezes she freely bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth's toad.
Elizabeth, saved by the sole of her boot,
Escaped her insensible sister's pursuit,
And if ever in future she irritates Anne
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.
This poem does not appear either in the collected poems or the letters and I have in fact never seen it in print; I copied it out some twenty-five years ago in a second-hand bookshop from a holographic facsimile page in a volume of memoirs of AEH written, I think, by his brother, and I can give no better citation for it than that. Nonetheless, a fine piece and a favourite of young children..
For more Houseman rarities see my home page.
And again this, from a letter to his brother, 1897:
The sea is a subject by no means exhausted. I have somewhere a poem which directs attention to one of its most striking characteristics, which hardly any of the poets seem to have observed. They call it salt and blue and deep and dark and so on; but they never make such profoundly true reflexions as the following:
O billows bounding far,
How wet, how wet ye are!
When first my gaze ye met
I said 'Those waves are wet'.
I said it, and am quite
Convinced that I was right.
Who saith that ye are dry?
I give that man the lie.
Thy wetness, O thou sea,
Is wonderful to me.
It agitates my heart,
To think how wet thou art.
No object I have met
Is more profoundly wet,
Methinks, 'twere vain to try,
O sea, to wipe thee dry,
I therefore will refrain -
Farewell, thou humid main.