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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
12:00 AM 21st September 2024
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Poem Of The Week: Parta Quies By A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

 
Parta Quies

Good-Night; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
Have these for yours,
While sea abides, and land,
And earth’s foundations stand,
And heaven endures.

When earth’s foundations flee,
Nor sky nor land nor sea
At all is found,
Content you, let them burn:
It is not your concern;
Sleep on, sleep sound.


Image by HtoH from Pixabay
Image by HtoH from Pixabay
Parta Quies: ‘Rest is won’. Housman’s apostrophic poem is delivered in two measured sestets of dimeter and trimeter whose alternating flow mimics the natural rhythm of a planet moving from the illusion of eternal continuity into the blast furnace of geomorphological destruction. The poem’s stanzaic transition between the present and a cataclysmic future enables the Latin meaning of an unending human rest finally earned to seem impermeable against the backdrop of blind cosmic forces.

As ‘Parta Quies’ processes, Housman’s somber intonation becomes increasingly persuasive. ‘Rest’, in the maelstrom of such forces, is not sleep at all, but rather, annihilation. The point at which religion and all corporeal considerations disappear in the conflagration – ‘let them burn’ is pronounced with the triumph of inviolate certainty – is rendered ironic in Housman’s closing line, whose sibilance describes a somnolence entirely at odds with the overwhelming sense of finitude.



‘Parta Quies’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950, first published by Oxford University Press (1972).