How Clear, How Lovely Bright

I have always been an Inspector Morse fan. I was surprised to realise that the show, starring John Thaw, had run for five series.

We had an enjoyable retrospective through all those old episodes earlier this year, finding some of the views expressed in the earlier episodes thoroughly wince-worthy. Some appear quite up to date, but some were truly, awfully out of step with 'normal' behaviour today. Yes, I know it is so thirty years ago, but it is stark to revisit past culture which still feels relatively recent.

Our retrospective culminated in the final the Inspector Morse episode, The Remorseful Day (Dexter, 1999). It was in rewatching this episode that I realised that - in many ways, this episode was themed around the third stanza of A E Housman's (1880) poem, How Clear, How Lovely Bright, which goes:

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

- A E Houseman

Colin Dexter was a very clever man. And - like our societal culture - past touch and sight and sound goes too our past.

References:

Dexter, C. (1999). The Remorseful Day. Macmillan. 

Houseman, A. E. (1880, 1936). How Clear, How Lovely Bright. Your Daily Poem. https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=737