Lost Content

It is Father’s Day today. It struck me today that I never once wished my father a Happy Father’s Day. When it was a happy day every day, you don’t feel the need to. Happiness is the default position. And then the day comes when you learn otherwise.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) published ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ in his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. It has always been a favourite poem, but now I really see its point. Housman wrote the poem shortly after the death of his father. It is a sad, sorrowful poem steeped in wistfulness for lost childhood, and is preoccupied with the memory of past delight haunting the present. It is a sad goodbye to happy days:

"Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.