Eng Hwk
Poetry
Because I Liked You Better analysis
A.E Housman Bio
• He was homosexual.
• Fell in love with a man named Moses Jackson, but was rejected as
Jackson was hetrosexual
• Jackson got married, and Housman was not invited and didn’t even
know about the wedding.
• After this they never spoke to each other.
Themes Present
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Unwanted Love
Loss
Grief
Promises
Moving on
Friendship
Structure
• First person. It seems to be a letter from the speaker to the
ex- lover, because of the repetitive structure of the stanzas.
It also looks like a letter because the speaker is talking to
someone and is trying to proving a point, in this case about
how the speaker kept his promise.
• This seems to relate to the fact that Housman fell in love
with his male friend but was rejected as the friend a ma
and heterosexual.
• The rhythm is sort-of repetitive and so gives a sense of no
passion present conveying an idea of his loss and his
sorrow. An example could be the same rhyming structure
throughout the whole poem.
Language
• The language used is formal, how they would use in a
letter, and plain to justify the point the speaker is
trying to make clear to the person the poem is to.
There is not much similes or metaphors, which
emphasizes how the speaker wants to get to the point
straight away.
• Later on the poem the language not only becomes
plain, but also firm, and with the use of imagery of ice
like “where clover whitens” and death like “dead
man’s knoll” the emotion in the ending is minimized.
Imagery
• Overall in the poem the images presented to the reader is
very minimum and most of which are presented near the
end of the poem.
• Imageries like death and cold/ ice are used to emphasize
how the speaker no longer feels for the person (even
though we know he does due to the fact that he has written
a whole poem based on the event) and his emotion are
minimum. Images like “no tall flower” , to me shows an
image of dying flowers, and at the same time the season
winter. The meaning of the line adds up to me and shows
that the reader is trying to compress his feelings with the
use of death/ice imagery.
Analysis
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The poem conveys a letter to the reader, the speaker telling the person (who the letter is
to) that he has kept his promise, and if according to Housman’s personal life is to his
friend Jackson about not meeting him again, and to say that he kept his promise about
not seeing each other, even till the person’s death. An example that shows this could be
“Good-bye, forget me”, or “We parted, stiff and dry”
The strong feeling of the speaker can also be seen through the fact that the speaker
vividly remembers the conversation they had before they parted as seen in the second
stanza, where he recalls it.
As the poem continues the language becomes more firm to minimize the feelings
present in the tone, like “Halt by the headstone”.
Also images of death are present in conjunction with the firm language like “ headstone
naming”. This is to show the reader that he no longer has feeling for the person and is
trying to prove the statement that his promise was kept.
Even though the reader is trying not to express his love for the person and that he still
cares about him, is conveyed by the fact that the speaker wrote the poem (or letter) in
the first place.
We can also see that he cares through the fact that the speaker visits the person’s
gravestone, and thus showing us that he probably regrets his promise, even though he
stuck to it till the very end.