by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: October 13, 2008   Last Updated: May 26, 2012

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff by A. E. Housman: I have enjoyed teaching this poem to high-school students over the years. They find it amusing, and the poem affords me opportunities to focus on poetic devices and terminology.

The poem consists of a friendly complaint about the themes and mood of poems contained in A Shropshire Lad, wherein he adopts for himself the name

Terence. The opening segment is easily separated from the remainder by quotation marks. Section two is the poet's response; section three a justification; the concluding section, a historical allusion to give weight to the poet's reasoning.

The complaint concerns the recurrent gloom of Terence's subject matter and tone: the "stupid stuff he writes. It concludes with a single line of suggestion or request. Terence's interlocutor begins by pointing out that the poet is clearly not physically ailing or dyspeptic or he would be incapable of the quantity and rate of his consumption of food and beer.

He goes on to parody Terence's poetry subjects, like a cow that has died. "The cow, the old cow, it is dead" pokes fun at poets and their tendency to repetition. "It sleeps well, the horned head" ridicules the way poets can take a single syllable word like "horned" and of metrical necessity make it a two-syllable word ("hor-ned"). Synecdoche or the use of a part to suggest the whole is also satirized. (The entire cow is "sleeping"; not just its head.) The delayed apposition of "it" and "the horned head" is another poetic manipulation as is the euphemistic substitution of "sleeps" for being no longer alive.

Readers can almost smell the beery breath of this speaker as he jests that hearing mournful poetry will be fatal to him and his mates as was whatever brought down the cow. He plays on alliteration (repetition of initial consonants) with "Moping, melancholy, mad," then requests something upbeat: "a tune to dance to."

Now begins Terence's similarly toned defense. Ale is more suitable than poetry for people who find serious subject matter headache-inducing. British aristocracy have made fortunes brewing ale in places like Burton-on-Trent, and their product is livelier or more mood-enhancing than that inspired by the muse of poetry. The poem's most often quoted lines employ the interlocutor's alliteration of the letter "m," in an allusion to John Milton's thematic statement of purpose in the epic Paradise Lost.

"Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to Man."

The world view one gets by

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