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
May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.
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.
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.
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.
No change, though you lie under / The land you used to plough.
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.
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I
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.
The rainy Pleiads wester, / Orion plunges prone, / The stroke of midnight ceases, / And I lie down alone.
Tomorrow, more's the pity, / Away we both must hie, To air the ditty / and to earth I.