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“Good Sir”. Because this song is addressed to a man, it seems to have been written from the point of view of a woman (although not necessarily by a woman).

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Because this refrain would probably have been sung as the refrain to a carol, it might have been accompanied by a dance, probably in a circle with the leader of the carol standing in the middle. This tradition continues today in adverts for Klondike Krunch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQzd3HmUVoY

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“Giusts”, or jousts as we’d spell it nowadays, were tournaments testing a knight’s prowess by getting him to ride as fast as he can at another knight with a lance and knock him off his horse, or (if you’re feeling particularly nasty) do him some permanent damage. There are a lot of jousts in the Faerie Queene, and the good guys usually win. The Redcross Knight is no exception.

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Pricking his horse, i.e. digging in the spurs to make it gallop. The Redcross Knight doesn’t hang about, which is one of the virtues of “Holinesse” as Spenser sees it: you can get more of God’s work done if you do it quickly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmJsWOUvB4

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Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

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Callapine’s the son of Bajazeth. If you watched the first Tamburlaine like a true fan, you’d know that Bajazeth was Tamburlaine’s captive before he smashed his brains out on his own cage. Things are going a bit better for Callapine, who’s escaped and is now leading a massive army.

What goes around, comes around.

The real Bajazeth – Bayezid I – actually had several sons, none of which can be decisively identified with Marlowe’s Callapine.

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A highway meant something slightly different for Housman than it does for us. There’s nothing happy about this:

The OED defines the earliest use of highway as “A public road open to all passengers, a high road”, although Housman’s highways are more personal.

Metaphorically, the “happy highways” (note the alliteration) can be thought of as ‘paths of life’: relationships, for example, which are often discussed as if they were journeys. Relationships are rarely all peaches and cream, but we often only remember the best bits. Housman wants to go back to the past – when things were as simple as the language of his poem – but it’s in the nature of time that we can’t go backwards. Now, if he wanted to go back to the future, that’d be another matter…

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Arguably, this is another of Housman’s little puns. The land’s “shining plain”, with the glow that makes a place stand out in memory; but it’s also a shining plain … geddit?!? As in, a plain which shines. I really can’t explain it any more than that.

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The land which the speaker’s getting so upset about might not be a real ‘place’ after all: the “land of lost content” is represented by pastoral England, but it’s got a deeper allegorical meaning. The memories he’s thinking about might be happy memories – times he was “content”, now lost because they’re in the past – or painful memories, as he thinks about the content that he could have had now, but lost through a missed opportunity or a bad decision.

This is a pretty general poem which is part of it’s lasting appeal: most readers can think of some “lost content” that resonates with this line. Still, Housman may have been thinking about his unreciprocated feelings for Moses Jackson, one of his roommates at Oxford.

Housman contemplating Moses Jackson

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i.e. Church spires. A landmark of the ‘traditional’ British village, which is part of what the nostalgia of this poem is yearning for. Note that Housman doesn’t say,

What skyscrapers, what carparks are those?

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Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

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Hills are blue when you see them from far off. That’s because blue light has a shorter wavelength than other visible colours of light: this means that it’s scattered more by the molecules in air, and so it spreads around the sky. The further off the hills are, the more atmosphere there is in between to divert blue light in our direction. So when we see blue hills, the blue light’s actually coming from the air in front of those hills.

What all this means is that those hills are a long way off. If they weren’t, they’d be green.

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