“Aunts and Nieces, or Time and Space.” Holograph manuscript poem of Housman’s long and grimly humorous poem
$15,000 · Offered by Biblio
2 pages (verso and recto), folio, ruled paper with St Winifred watermark, unsigned. “Aunts and Nieces” comprises 52 lines of manuscript verse to both sides, the text differing in minor ways from the published version: there is one correction to line 34 [“need not” changed to “will not”], and Housman’s dividing the sections of the poem with asterisks is unique to this manuscript. The poem relates how a niece scorns her aunt’s advice to “avoid, at the approach of dark / Eliza, the umbrageous park” lest “forth the cockatrice will frisk, / and out will bounce the basilisk, / and the astoundingly absurd / yet dangerous cockyoly-bird / will knock you, with its baneful beak, / into the middle of next week”. Eliza goes to the park, while her aunt meets the prospect of her niece’s doom with chilling sang-froid, and the aunt’s prophesy, exactly and literally, comes to pass: “Then, from behind, a vicious peck / descended on Eliza’s neck. / Eliza into the azure distance / Followed the line of least resistance. / * * * / In the middle of next week / There will be heard a piercing shriek, / And looking pale and weak and thin / Eliza will come flying in”. Housman is better known for his darker, some might say morbid, side, but his sense of humor – admittedly somewhat dark, too – was expressed in a number of poems that share certain qualities associated with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Housman’s brother Laurence Housman published the first selection of his brother’s unpublished comic vers
- Binding: unknown
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