A. E. Housman's Latin Elegy to Moses Jackson

Abstract

THE READING AT THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING of the APA in Philadelphia of Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love, 1 a drama which places much emphasis on Housman's unrequited love for Moses Jackson, his undergraduate contemporary at St John's College, Oxford and housemate in London lodgings in the late 1870s and early 1880s, motivated me to look again at the Latin elegy addressed to Jackson with which Housman prefaced his edition of the first book of Manilius' Astronomica, published in 1903. 2 After an inscription sodali meo M. I. Jackson, harum litterarum contemptori, "to my comrade Moses Jackson, scorner of these studies," in an ironic version of the usual dedication of a learned work to a fellow scholar, 3 fourteen elegiac couplets follow. The choice of elegiacs for Housman's dedicatory poem is of course natural given the dedicatory function of epigrams in antiquity, 4 but its address to a friend from whom the poet is separated at the other end of the world also recalls the basic situation of Ovid's elegiac exile poetry. By 1903 Housman was Professor of Latin at University College London, while Jackson was far away as a headmaster in India, where he had been (apart from occasional visits to England) [End Page 209] since 1887, 5 and Housman's elegy shows throughout an ethos of lamentation for opportunity lost through physical apartness which matches that of Ovid in exile. The poem begins with an evocation of starlit evenings long ago (1-4):