The sloe was lost in flower,
The April elm was dim;
That was the lover’s hour,
The hour for lies and him.

If thorns are all the bower,
If North winds freeze the fir,
Why, ’tis another’s hour,
The hour for truth and her.

This tiny, perfect, razor-edged lyric is numbered XXII in Housman’s Last Poems, from 1922. Lines two and four in each stanza were originally indented. Some editors consider XXII to be a new poem; written considerably earlier than others in Last Poems, and intermittently revised but never published.

Spring has rarely been more freshly evoked. The opening pair of woodland images is more eye-catching – and more subtly figurative – than those “cherries hung with snow” admired by the Shropshire Lad. The sloe, or blackthorn, and the elm are turned into delicate, unfamiliar, almost ghostly symbols of renewal, while the elm is traditionally associated with melancholy.

The depiction of the sloe as “lost in flower” accurately conveys the profusion of its snowy blossoms, and simultaneously suggests the physical and psychological immersion of the lovers in each other. Both the thorn-bush and the tree seem masked, as if anticipating the “lies” proclaimed in lines three and four. Perhaps Housman intends those attributes “lost” and “dim” to suggest the sloe and the elm represent the ill-matched human couple: one deceiving, the other deceived.

We have to look up a good deal higher from the lovers’ bower to see the elm’s wide canopy, its branches masked by the green haze of young foliage, and perhaps the remains of its early, “blush-tinged, tassel-like flowers.” “The April elm was dim” also suggests the effects of a special “hour” of the day, perhaps sunset or early evening. As a line, it is utterly magical. In fact, I’d settle for XXII as a two-lined poem about spring, and be extremely satisfied.

The commentary that forms lines three and four in each quatrain seems to be a condensed version of an old seduction/betrayal story, so fiercely edited and close to the bone it spits and stings. The sentimental moment when the ephemeral vagueness of spring represents and shelters “the lover’s hour” is whipped away by the cold little juxtaposition of the zeugma, “…lies and him.”

The first quatrain belongs to the past – by the second, things have got colder and thornier. Fast-forwarding to winter in the present, Housman might appear to soften his narrative by twice using a conditional clause, but the conjunction “If” is an oral, storytelling rhetorical device here, and belies the tragic inevitability. There’s really little doubt whether “thorns are all the bower” – and how perfectly that description brings out the overwhelming nature of the hidden misery. The multiple thorns are revealed, and revealed to face in all directions, as when love goes wrong: they were there all along, of course, though once “lost in flower”.

Housman continues, still in storytelling mode: “Why, ’tis another’s hour,/The hour for truth and her.” If the audience is horrified, the poet is standing back, crafting his dramatic effects. He is sardonic, perhaps even mirthlessly smiling.

“The humour in Housman’s best poems is not obvious at all,” John Bayley once observed, and this poem is thinly-laced with Housman humour at its bleakest. Perhaps “humour” is too warm a term, but there seems to be a degree of pleasure lurking in the tone, and in the poet’s agile placement of cruel symmetries in the story.

The truth that belongs to “her” is a bitter triumph. Is it suffered alone by the woman, or shared by the male lover? I wonder about the speaker’s relationship with the narrative, and whether we should imagine a figure close to the “him” of the fourth line. Could the narrative voice be the woman’s? And what is the nature of the lies – does “he” declare his love to “her” while loving someone else? It might be that the narrator, reflecting Housman and his unrequited love for Moses Jackson, is looking askance at traditional, heterosexual relationships, and almost relishing the betrayal they could sometimes represent.

While the poem harmonises, in the time-honoured manner, nature and feeling, spring and romance, the final lines of the quatrains abruptly tear that mazy fabric apart. The last gesture seems the fiercest, a fatal coup de grâce. Meanwhile, Housman has kept the mystery of the sombre story intact, the nature of his own emotion secret. If the poem laughs, it’s angry laughter.