I was diagnosed last year with ADHD of the inattentive type. It has not been a fun time and I’ve been struggling to articulate how I feel but I think I’ve found something that captures where I am and what I fear for the future in AE Housman’s poem, ‘How Clear, How Lovely Bright’, though possibly better known for its last line that was used in the Morse books and television programmes: ‘The Remorseful Day’.
Housman was writing about his own repressed homosexuality in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I think it works for other circumstances, though you have to squint a bit.
Housman wrote ‘How Clear, How Lovely Bright’ not longer after having been failed out of Oxford. Instead of being with the man he loved, Moses Jackson, in the surrounds of Oxford, he had moved to London to work as a patent clerk. He knew he was capable of much more (indeed, he would become a professor of Latin at Cambridge), but also knew that Jackson was heterosexual. He is realising his situation and trying to gird his loins to fight against it, but he is realistic. Moses will never love him – can never love him – as he loves Moses, and that regret, echoed in other regrets about the path of his life. No matter what he does knows (and I think the second stanza can be read as honest intent or as trying to shore up a failing belief that he can find a measure of happiness) that he will end up looking back on his life with sadness.
I’m at a point where I wish I hadn’t got the damned diagnosis. It seems to have only brought me distress. From that view, the first stanza is, I think, the bliss of ignorance in the past. The second stanza is a recognition of who and what you are today and a determination to make up for all the lost moments. The third stanza is the future and the fear that it is already too late and we are set on a path that will inevitably see us close our days looking back, like Housman, in regret. I think I feel that so much of my life has gone, I’m locked into the consequences of so many decisions (that I’m now beginning to understand), and there are experiences I just cannot have that even if I get everything right from here on out (and Heaven knows I’m not), I’m going to end up an old man in a chair, softly crying at what could have been.
How clear, how lovely bright,
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XVI “How clear, how lovely bright”
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.
To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.
Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.
While the message of the poem, on either reading, is powerful, I find the rhyme scheme forced; it gets in the way. The AABCCCB scheme does mean that the final line of each stanza hits hard, but the triplet distracts from the flow. I think “Not further to be found” could be struck from the third stanza and noone would notice. The first stanza could be “How heaven laughs out with glee/Where from the eastern sea/Soars the delightful day”. I don’t know how you’d rework the middle stanza easily.