Anthony Lane

“It is true that the ideal Housman reader would have the Authorized Version of the Bible, especially the Book of Isaiah, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, at his or her fingertips, plus a heavy grounding in Milton and, for good measure, all of Horace and Heine; but we regret that the ideal reader is unavailable at this time, and thus the field is left open to nonprofessionals—to those who have just enough time to wonder why a poem that appears, in paraphrase, to be full of the joys of spring should sound, with its long autumnal vowels, like a lament:

When green buds hang in the elm like dust
And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must
And drink of life again.

Forth I must by hedgerow bowers
To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo flowers
Are lying about the world.

As Housman said, in some annoyance, about a line of Milton's that made him weep, "What in the world is there to cry about?”
― Anthony Lane, Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker