On Moonlit Heath and Lonesome Bank
by A.E. Housman

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.

A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.

And naked to the hangman's noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.

And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land.

So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine,
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine;

And wish my friend as sound a sleep
As lads' I did not know,
That shepherded the moonlit sheep
A hundred years ago.

A. E. Housman writes lovely lines full of startling irony, verse which is, in his own words “moping, melancholy, mad (“Terence, this is stupid stuff”). “Everyone writes badly at times,” poet, critic, and novelist Charles Williams (best known as one of the Oxford Christians surrounding C. S. Lewis) once wrote, “except Mr. Housman.” Everything in Housman’s poetry is wry, sad, and beautifully expressed in language that is both simple and elegant.

“On moonlit heath and lonesome bank” protests capital punishment and looks askance at human nature and life’s meaningless randomness as Housman sees it. The old custom of hanging criminals at a crossroad and leaving the dead bodies there as a horrible example was called “keeping sheep by moonlight,” literal gallows humor. By the time of the poem, things have advanced: “They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail.” The key word is us. The speaker insists upon our identifying with the condemned. The authorities, the ones who do the hanging, are They. The speaker is set to watch outside through the night, awaiting the morning when his friend will hang, “A better lad, if things went right / Than most that sleep outside.” But, of course, things have not gone right. In Housman’s pessimistic world view they almost never do. A two-stanza description of hanging compels our sympathy through understatement and precise word choice: a “naked” (unprotected, vulnerable) neck “God made” will be “strangled in a string.” The man’s essential goodness, not his innocence of the unnamed crime, is again stated: “as straight a chap / As treads upon the land.” Society’s hiding execution by moving hanging indoors has not changed its violent brutality. Legally sanctioned murder protects society, the reasoning goes, by instilling fear of consequences in all and by removing the “evildoer” from society. That it hasn’t worked doesn’t stop us from doing it; the reasoning apparently is that eventually punishment will stop crime.

A Course in Miracles says such “reasoning” is insane. Law is a pathetic substitute for love. The Course says, “See only the light in your brother.” In the real world of oneness and love, the world God gives to replace the one we made out of the idea of separation, crime is simply impossible. In truth, the Course reminds us, our oneness with all others renders us incapable of either attacking or being attacked.

The Separated Ego is quick to respond. “Yeah. Well, you can’t live like that. Just try it and see what happens. Somebody will crucify you. Criminals will overcome us all. It’ll be chaos.” Few of us have ever tried to live love, and we don’t know what will happen if we do. ACIM says Jesus’ resurrection demonstrates the unreality of the body and the impossibility of our ability to harm anything that is real. “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” Jesus did not die for us because death does not exist. He paid no price for our sins because we cannot sin. Minds, souls cannot attack. God is Love, Love is all in all, and only Love can be real. Perceiving Love’s real world is a choice we can make, and once we make it, all Love rushes into our awareness. We are not asked to continue on “the basis of an unsupported faith.” Faith is replaced by knowledge through experience.

When we try it and see what happens, we can know through experience God’s loving care. We can choose whether we operate from the Holy Spirit’s view of the wholeness of the real world and of ourselves within it, or the Separated Ego’s premise of disassociation. If we choose the premise of our identity with the true minds of our brothers and God, there is no need for law or punishment or any of the other conflicting dramas we have chosen over Love.. Under the laws of the separation, our world view is based on our perception that Love is untrustworthy. And so we go on and on in fear, making our repetitious stories, and calling them grand.

Housman’s poem is not on a grand scale, but there are works on a grand scale which also consider the theme of imposing punishment, sacrificing for “ the greater good,” a staple of our most cherished beliefs. For example, in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Billy kills the “diabolical” villain Claggart, and Captain Vere, the authority who will sanction Billy’s hanging, exclaims, “Struck dead by an angel of God Yet the angel must hang.” What Vere does not see, what Housman does not contemplate, is the truth that love does no violence. Killing Claggart–the need for removing Claggart from the society–comes back to the belief in sin. If Claggart’s evil exists, Billy, the hero, must remove the evil one, slay the dragon. Then, to restore/maintain order, Billy and all lawbreakers such as Housman’s “better lad,” regardless of circumstance in the story we’re making up, must be sacrificed to protect the greater society. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who wants to think the situation through, must learn to stop thinking about it and just go ahead and act, kill Claudius, and die himself. When, in the last act, he does, “proper order” is restored, and the unthinking warrior-hero Fortinbras will rule Denmark, and everybody can go on killing everybody else in “ righteous” wars forever. Shakespeare’s Henry V says, “I need a war” to solidify his rule. What he doesn’t need is Falstaff, who is as close to Love as Hal can ever get. So Falstaff dies, and Henry gets his war. Housman’s lad, like Billy, Hamlet and even Falstaff, is sacrificed to fear of disorder, and bowing to fear’s demands creates more futile attempts to control fear.

Executing bodies, a response fueled by fear in an attempt to establish order, is but one of the mistakes that has kept us in a nightmare world for the more than 2,000 years since Jesus’ resurrection demonstrated that we are not bodies, and that what we are cannot die. Destroying bodies feeds the Separated Ego’s illusions of power but does not make the separation real. Death has no power because it does not exist . Sacrifice is meaningless when, in reality, all there is is Love. .

“On moonlit heath and lonesome bank” can take us on a longer trip than ever Housman envisioned. Loving consideration can help us perceive a world, the real world, where the questions of sacrifice and punishment never come up.