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
Tomorrow, more's the pity, / Away we both must hie, To air the ditty / and to earth I.
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
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.
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.
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
Here of a Sunday morning / My love and I would lie, / And see the coloured counties, / And hear the larks so high / About us in the sky.
And how am I to face the odds, Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid, In a world I never made
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