‘Is my team ploughing’ is poem XXVII in A.E.Housman’s 1896 collection ‘A Shropshire Lad’, and shows the poet’s skill at adapting the question and answer format of folk ballads for his own mordantly humorous purposes.
The poem was famously set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I suppose the price we have to pay for such sublime pieces of music as ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’, ‘Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus’ and ‘Job: A Masque for Dancing’ is Vaughan Williams’s penchant for making ghastly drawing-room arrangements of other people’s poems. Housman himself did not like the result at all and was particularly annoyed to discover that Vaughan Williams had cut out verses 3 and 4 – ‘how would he like it if I started cutting bars out of his music?’, but Vaughan Williams was unrepentant and defended himself stoutly, saying he felt that ‘a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as “The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal”’. Reluctantly I have to agree that those two verses are indeed no great loss.
XXVII
‘Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?’
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
‘Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?’
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.
‘Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?’
Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.
‘Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?’
Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
A.E.Housman
David Sutton 
I like the Vaughan Williams piece, but I prefer the George Butterworth version. I like the idea of Houseman being outraged by Williams too. I’m fond of the pair of them and see it as an amusing spat which undermines lovable aspects of both characters.
if you are at all interested, I wrote a response to the poem which you can find here. https://zoomburst.substack.com/p/11-hanging-around-in-graveyards-and
Houseman would have probably been outraged!
Thanks. I’d be the first to admit that my musical intelligence is limited, but I really don’t like art song settings of poems, while I’m quite amenable to folksong settings. The folk band Show of Hands do a version of ‘The lads in their hundreds’ which I rather like, though it would probably horrify Housman. And I have an album ‘Loveliest of Trees’ by the folksinger Polly Bolton which intersperses her vocal settings with Nigel Hawthorne recitations of Housman poems. Polly is actually a little bit towards the art song end of folksong but that’s as far as I go!
I was pleased to read your own take on Housman: always good to meet a fellow enthusiast. No ‘e’ in Housman though!
Hahaha! The shame of it! I must have read his name a couple of thousand times at least and just kept right on spelling it with an ‘e’! I have just gone to my Substack and edited the two Housman articles I have written there, but I have probably mentioned him in others. Thanks for pointing that out.
I will certainly be checking out your folk music versions of his poetry, but I have to admit, that I am quite fond of mournful serious voices accompanied by piano.