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
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
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
About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.
A neck God made for other use / Than strangling in a string.
They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.
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.
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
White in the moon the long road lies, The moon stands blank above; White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love. Still hangs the hedge without a gust, Still, still the shadows stay: My feet upon the moonlit dust Pursue the ceaseless way. The world is round, so travellers tell, And straight through reach the track, Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well, The way will guide one back. But ere the circle homeward hies Far, far must it remove: White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love.
Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.
There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
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.