Part of the reason A.E. Housman (1859–1936) holds a high and immovable place for those who read and write formal poetry is that — as the Sun pointed out in March, when the Poem of the Day column featured Housman’s sardonic “When I Was One-and-Twenty” — the British poet had a facility for making formal verse look easy. And as every writer knows, simple is hard. Maybe the hardest of all things to do. Everyone is forced to recognize Housman as a great craftsman. In “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” (1917), a pair of tetrameter quatrains, rhymed abab, measure the ironic distance between the heroic language of grand myth and the flatness of commercial monetary terms: such lines as “Their shoulders held the sky suspended” ironically set against such lines as “And took their wages and are dead.” In just eight lines, however, Housman turns that verbal irony itself into the stuff of tragedy and cosmic purpose: “What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay.”

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
by A.E. Housman

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.