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
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.
Oh when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again.
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I
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.
A neck God made for other use / Than strangling in a string.
Ensanguining the skies, How heavily it dies, Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound, Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground, Falls the remorseful day
Think no more; 'tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.
And then the clock collected in the tower / Its strength and struck.
May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
No change, though you lie under / The land you used to plough.
Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.