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 silence sounds no worse than cheers / After death has stopped the ears.
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.
Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk, it has seen Porson sober. I am a greater scholar than Wordsworth and I am a greater poet than Porson. So I fall betwixt and between.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
Think no more; 'tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.
No change, though you lie under / The land you used to plough.
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
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.
I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.