'Plying with speed my partnership of knees'

 On this day in 1936 – 14 years after the publication of his Last Poems – A.E. Housman died in Cambridge at the age of 77. He was a reluctant poet, who seldom felt the urge to write verse, and that usually when he was feeling ill or depressed (it shows). Great poet though he was at his best, he regarded his poetry as a 'morbid secretion', akin to that which produces the pearl in an oyster, and he viewed his poems as being far less important and valuable than his contributions to classical studies. 
It would be easy to mark his death with one of his many death-haunted poems, some of which come close to Hugh Kingsmill's parody (the one beginning 'What! Still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you?'). However, the elegiac was not the only tone that Housman could strike, and one atypical product of his that I've always cherished is this 'Fragment of a Greek Tragedy', a genuinely funny parody of Aeschylus and of the many bad translations thereof. The original version (below) was written for The Bromsgrovian, the magazine of Bromsgrove School, where Housman studied and, for a brief period after his Oxford humiliation (failing his Finals in Greats), taught. Clearly he sympathised with the struggles of his hapless pupils caught in the toils of Aeschylean translation...

[Alcmaeon and Chorus]

Cho. O gracefully-enveloped-in-a-cloak
Head of a stranger, wherefore, seeking what,
Whence, by what way, how purposed are you come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My cause of asking is, I wish to know.
But if perchance, from being deaf and dumb,
You cannot understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.
Alc. I journeyed hither on Ambracian road.
Cho. Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
Alc. Plying with speed my partnership of knees.
Cho. Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alc. Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my legs.
Cho. Your name I not unwillingly would learn.
Alc. Not all that men desire do they obtain.
Cho. Might I then know at what your presence aims?
Alc. A shepherd's questioned tongue informed me that -
Cho. What? for I know not yet what you will say.
Alc. - this house was Eriphyle's, no one's else.
Cho. Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.
Alc. Might I then enter, going through the door?
Cho. Go; drag into the house a lucky foot;
And, O my son, be on the one hand good,
And do not on the other hand be bad.
And then thou wilt be like the man who speaks,
And not unlike thine interlocutor.
Alc. I go into the house with legs and speed.

CHORUS

(Strophe)

In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But, after pondering much,
To this conclusion I at last have come:
Life is uncertain.
This I have written deep
In my reflective midriff,
On tablets not of wax.
Nor with a stylus did I write it there,
For obvious reasons: Life, I say, is not
Divested of uncertainty.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This truth did I discover,
Nor did the Delphian tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

(Antistrophe)

Why should I mention
The Inachian daughter, loved of Zeus,
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for:
And sent her forth to learn
The unaccustomed science
Of how to chew the cud?
She, therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle tops,
Nor did they disagree with her;
But yet, however wholesome, such repasts,
Myself, I deem unpleasant.
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? I repeat.
I have no notion why.

(Epode)

Why does my boding heart
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A most displeasing tune?
Nay even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes,
The right one as well as the left,
Like a slaughter-house, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I, therefore, in a Cissian strain lament, And with the rapid,
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

Eriphyle (within) Oh, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw!
In deed, I mean, and not in word alone.
Cho. Methinks I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the accent of festivity.
Erip. He cracks my skull, not in a friendly way:
It seems he purposes to kill me dead.
Cho. I would not be considered rash, but yet
I doubt if all is well within the house.
Erip. Oh, oh, another blow! this makes the third:
He stabs my heart, a harsh unkindly act.
Cho. Indeed, if that be so, ill-fated one,
I fear we scarce can hope thou wilt survive.