It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.

The nettle nods, the winds blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.

(A Shropshire Lad, XVI)

Housman is here rewriting, reworking, Wordsworth’s A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. As Wordsworth’s “no motion has she now, no force” recalls the “sensible warm motion” of Claudio’s speech to Isabella in Measure for Measure ((III. i. l16-32), so Housman’s “[t]he man, he does not move” refers back to Wordsworth. Both poems are concerned with what it means for a formerly living person “to lie in cold obstruction and to rot”; and both are concerned with motive force as the metaphorical essence of life, of liveliness.

“The man, he does not move”, can be read as an expression of stoic apathy: the fate of “the lover of the grave” is unmoving; we are unmoved by it. But what could be more moving than the loss of a person’s ability to move us, their subtraction from the world of our sympathies? In Wordsworth’s poem, the conjunction of “motion” and “force” indicates that the inner animatedness of living creatures is also an externally directed power: while “motion” dances about within its own ambit, “force” acts upon other objects to produce effects. “Force” is affecting; and yet what breaks the “slumber” of Wordsworth’s poem is the withdrawal of such affect: stillness where motion once was.

The conceit of Shakespeare’s “cold obstruction” is that it is “the grave” itself that is responsible for the transformation of a “sensible warm motion” into the senseless inertia of the “kneaded clod”. An unmoving object cannot be said to be obstructed, and a body without senses (or heat of its own) cannot feel the cold. “What we fear of death” is not death itself, but living-death: not the cessation of sensation, but the withdrawal of sensation from a being that will experience this, in some sense, as deprivation (what Daniel Dennett, in quite another context, calls “epistemic hunger”).

Larkin’s terror, in Aubade, of having “nothing to think with / Nothing to love or link with” is derived from the proposed consolation that “[n]o rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel”. Such rationalisation, Larkin feels, is “specious stuff”, the fear of death being “a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels”. But it takes a certain “trick” to keep the fear alive, as well; and Larkin, who claimed that “deprivation” was to him “as daffodils were to Wordsworth”, must translate thinking into having something to think with in order to imagine the horror of having that something taken away.

“Nothing to love or link with” is grammatically ambiguous: it can mean having nothing to love, nothing to become attached to; or it can mean having nothing with which to love and form attachments. The former privation is rather more readily imaginable than the latter; it is perhaps rather counter-intuitive to think of loving and forming attachments as something that one does with something else, some special organ or instrument (a jazz trumpet, say). It is one thing to be afraid of being isolated and lonely – of becoming detached from the world, immured in some “cold obstruction” – and quite another to be afraid of losing one’s ability to feel, like a patient etherised upon a table. Yet it is the second fear that has Larkin in its grip: in Aubade, death is pithily, if misleadingly, summarised as “the anaesthetic from which none come round”.

“The lover of the grave” is not the lover of any person; and the consummation he achieves by hanging himself is not the cementing of an emotional attachment, however devoutly it may have been wished. Housman seems to be asserting that young men who hang themselves “for love” are devotees of death, rather than of the loved one in whose name the deed is done. But this death-wish does not express itself as a direct yearning for the grave: there is always some girl whose misfortune it must be to get dragged into the affair. The splendid I.T. is surely correct in her observation that the “real” Annabelle of Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness is decidedly “not special”, and that it is this very lack of specialness that makes her such a suitable object for Kelsey’s “decisional” devotion, a devotion that bestows on the beloved all the attributes of enjoyment that the lover’s dysphoria has subtracted from the world.

If it is a property of living bodies that they have both “motion” and “force”, if their activities of loving and linking are inherently transitive and require external objects to love and link with, then “the man” who “does not move”, who has no place (as Housman seems to assert) in our sympathies as we have no place in his, is a figure of death as intransitivity – as cold abstraction. Why, then, does the death-wish of the “lover of the grave” require a woman (and no particularly special sort of woman at that) as love-object? Why hang oneself for love?

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