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
The young man feels his pockets / And wonders what's to pay.
About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.
And then the clock collected in the tower / Its strength and struck.
Think no more; 'tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.
The rainy Pleiads wester, / Orion plunges prone, / The stroke of midnight ceases, / And I lie down alone.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
O Queen of air and darkness,I think 'tis truth you say,And I shall die to-morrow;But you will die to-day.
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?
In my fourteenth year I had gone up to London for the first time, to see as many of the sights as could be got into a fortnight.
The goal stands up, the keeper / Stands up to keep the goal.
The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild; / He has devoured the infant child. / The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear.
And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After death has stopped the ears.
And like a skylit water stood, The bluebells in the azured wood