Observations placeholder
Knight, Dame Laura and A. E. Housman
Identifier
024355
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Poem by Alfred Edward Housman.
Houseman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1859 and was educated at Bromsgrove School and at St ]ohn’s College, Oxford. He worked for many years as a Higher Division Clerk
in the Patent Office in London, but when the Professor of Greek and Latin at University College London died he was offered the chair and took the seat in 1892. He went on to become a distinguished classical scholar, a poet, and, in 1911, Professor of Latin at Cambridge University.
He died in 1936.
Land army girl 1939 - In September 1939 Knight was asked to produce a recruitment poster for the Women's Land Army. Knight hired two Suffolk Punch horses and a plough from a farmer and painted them outdoors in a cherry orchard on the Averills' farm in Worcestershire. Her original design for the WLA poster was rejected for placing too much emphasis on the horses rather than the women working. During the Second World War, Knight was an official war artist, contracted by the War Artists' Advisory Committee on short-term commissions.
A description of the experience
‘On the idle hill of summer’
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and West on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.