What is the interpretation of the last two verses of 'Because I Liked You Better' by A.E. Housman? Thanks.The first two stanzas of 'Because I Liked...

In the final two stanzas of A. E. Housman’s poem “Because
I liked you better,” the speaker imagines that his one-time friend will someday pass
near the mound (“knoll” [10]) of the speaker’s grave in a cemetery.  In such a grassy,
pastoral setting, the “clover whitens” (9), and the reference to “trefoiled grass” (12)
probably refers to the three leaves of the green clover plant, with their white blooms
above them. Interestingly, Hans Biedermann in his Dictionary of
Symbolism (New York: Facts on File, 1992) notes that three-leaved clover
plants had by the middle ages become symbols of the Christian Trinity.  They were thus
suitable as graveyard plantings.

Biedermann also notes that
“In medieval love poetry, couples often met or made love ‘in clover’” (72).  If Housman
and many of his readers were aware of this association of clover with falling in love
and with love-making, the clover imagery at the end of this poem might have seemed
especially ironic, since the speaker and the young man to whom he was once attracted
were never able to fully express (let alone physically consummate) any love that may
once have existed between them. In any case, Biedermann also notes that “Because clover,
presumably as a reference to new life after resurrection, was at one time planted on
graves, it also came to symbolize parting” (72).

Thus the
imagery of clover at the end of Housman’s poem may be significant in multiple ways: as a
symbol of frustrated love; as a symbol of the social prohibition against love-making
between these two same-sexed people; as a symbol associated with graves and death; and
as a symbol associated with parting. Whether all these meanings are truly plausible, it
seems safe to say that the imagery of greenness and clover is at least appropriate to a
graveyard setting.

No tall plants (“no tall flower[s]”
[11]) are allowed to grow in the grass surrounding graves.  Gravesites are regularly
mowed, keeping most vegetation quite low to the ground.  The absence of a “tall flower”
may symbolize the absence of the flourishing, beautiful love the two men might have been
able to share at one time – a love which is now gone forever. (It is even possible that
the upright flower imagery here has understated sexual
implications.)

In the final stanza, the speaker asks the
man who once attracted him to acknowledge that the now-dead speaker has lived up to the
promise of distance and silence that he (the speaker) long ago made.  The speaker’s
buried heart is now no longer “stirred” by the visitor, but only because that heart is
imagined to be dead.  At the time of the writing of the poem, however, the speaker still
seems to be in enough love with his one-time friend to imagine this grave-side scenario
and to write the present wistful, nostalgic poem.