A. E. Housman
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 March 1859
I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder? He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder, And went with half my life about my ways.
Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, I'd face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good.
Give me a land of boughs in leaf A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land.
A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me.
About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.
The young man feels his pockets / And wonders what's to pay.
Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk, it has seen Porson sober. I am a greater scholar than Wordsworth and I am a greater poet than Porson. So I fall betwixt and between.
Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows: / What are those blue remembered hills, / What spires, what farms are those?
His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.