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
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.
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I
How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day. To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before. 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.
Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.
Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
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
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
No change, though you lie under / The land you used to plough.
May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
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.
Tomorrow, more's the pity, / Away we both must hie, To air the ditty / and to earth I.