by A E Housman
Would murmur and be mine.
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.
XLI. FANCY’S KNELL
When lads were home from labour
At Abdon under Clee,
A man would call his neighbor
And both would send for me.
And where the light in lances
Across the mead was laid,
There to the dances
I fetched my flute and played.
Ours were idle pleasures,
Yet oh, content we were,
The young to wind the measures,
The old to heed the air;
And I to lift with playing
From tree and tower and steep
The light delaying,
And flute the sun to sleep.
The youth toward his fancy
Would turn his brow of tan,
And Tom would pair with Nancy
And Dick step off with Fan;
The girl would lift her glances
To his, and both be mute:
Well went the dances
At evening to the flute.
Wenlock Edge was umbered,
And bright was Abdon Burf,
And warm between them slumbered
The smooth green miles of turf;
Until from grass and clover
The upshot beam would fade,
And England over
Advanced the lofty shade.
The lofty shade advances,
I fetch my flute and play:
Come, lads, and learn the dances
And praise the tune to-day.
To-morrow, more’s the pity,
Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.
MORE POEMS
CONTENTS
I. Easter Hymn
II.
III.
IV. The Sage to the Young Man
V. Diffugere Nives, Horace — Odes, IV 7
VI.
VII.
VIII.A
VIII.B
VIII.C
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI. I Counsel You Beware
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
XXXI.
XXII.
XXXIII.
XXXIV.
XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXXVII.
XXXVIII.
XXXIX.
XL.
XLI.
XLII. A. J. J.
XLIII.
XLIV.
XLV.
XLVI. The Land of Biscay
XLVII.
XLVIII. Parta Quies
Housman in middle years
They say my verse is sad: no wonder.
Its narrow measure spans
Rue for eternity, and sorrow
Not mine, but man’s.
This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.
I. Easter Hymn
If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.
Bu if the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.
II.
When Israel out of Egypt came
Safe in the sea they trod;
By day in cloud, by night in flame,
Went on before them God.
He brought them with a stretched out hand
Dry-footed through the foam,
Past sword and famine, rock and sand,
Lust and rebellion, home.
I never over Horeb heard
The blast of advent blow;
No fire-faced prophet brought me word
Which way behoved me go.
Ascended is the cloudy flame,
The mount of thunder dumb;
The tokens that to Israel came,
To me they are not come.
I see the country far away
Where I shall never stand;
The heart goes where no footstep may
Into the promised land.
III.
For these of old the trader
Unpearled the Indian seas,
The nations of the nadir
Were diamondless for these;
A people prone and haggard
Beheld their lightnings hurled:
All round, like Sinai, staggered
The sceptre-shaken world.
But now their coins are tarnished,
Their towers decayed away,
Their kingdom swept and garnished
For haler kings then they;
Their arms the rust hath eaten,
Their statutes none regard:
Arabia shall not sweeten
Their dust, with all her nard.
They cease from long vexation,
Their nights, their days are done,
The pale, the perished nation
That never see the sun;
From the old deep-dusted annals
The years erase their tale,
And round them race the channels
That take no second sail.
IV. The Sage to the Young Man
O youth whose heart is right,
Whose loins are girt to gain
The hell-defended height
Where Virtue beckons plain;
Who seest the stark array
And hast not stayed to count
But singly wilt assay
The many-cannoned mount:
Well is thy war begun;
Endure, be strong and strive;
But think not, O my son,
To save thy soul alive.
Wilt thou be true and just
And clean and kind and brave?
Well; but for all thou dost
Be sure it shall not save.
Thou, when the night falls deep,
Thou, though the mount be won,
High heart, thou shalt but sleep
The sleep denied to none.
Other, or ever thou,
To scale those heights were sworn;
And some achieved, but now
They never see the morn.
How shouldst thou keep the prize?
Thou wast not born for aye.
Content thee if thine eyes
Behold it in thy day.
O youth that wilt attain,
On, for thine hour is short.
It may be thou shalt gain
The hell-defended fort.
V. Diffugere Nives, Horace — Odes, IV 7
The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.
The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
> The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou was not born for aye.
Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn, with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.
But oh, whate’er the sky’led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams:
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.
Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy hear has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.
When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o’er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.
Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithoüs in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.
VI.
I to my perils
Of cheat and charmer
Came clad in armour
By star benign.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man’s deceiver
Was never mine.
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck of fame
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
VII.
Stars, I have see them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault’
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.
VIII.A
Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land.
VIII.B
Alas, the country whence I fare,
It is where I would stay;
And where I would not, it is there
That I shall be for aye.
VIII.C
And one remembers, and one forgets,
But ’tis not found again,
Not though they hale in crimsoned nets
The sunset from the main.
IX.
When green buds hang in the elm like dust
And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must
And drink of life again.
Forth I must by hedgerow bowers
To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo-flowers
Are lying about the world.
X.
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.
XI.
The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of,
And ‘twill not dream of me.
XII.
I promise nothing: friends will part;
All things may end, for all began;
And truth and singleness of heart
Are mortal even as is man.
But this unlucky love should last
When answered passions thin to air;
Eternal fate so deep has cast
Its sure foundation of despair.
XIII.
I lay me down and slumber
And every morning revive.
Whose is the night-long breathing
That keeps a man alive?
When I was off to dreamland
And left my limbs forgot,
Who stayed at home to mind them,
And breathed when I did not?
...
...
...
For oh, ’twas never I
If I were you, young fellow,
I’d save what breath I had,
For sleepers cut the waking:
Oh, spare your pains, my lad.
— I waste my time in talking,
No heed at all takes he,
My kind and foolish comrade
That breathes all night for me.
XIV.
The farms of home lie lost in even,
I see far off the steeple stand;
West and away, from here to heaven,
Still is the land.
There if I go no girl will greet me,
No comrade hollo from the hill,
No dog run down the yard to meet me:
The land is still.
The land is still by farm and steeple,
And still for me the land may stay:
There I was friends with perished people,
[And] there lie they.
XV.
Tarry, delight; so seldom met,
So sure to perish, tarry still.
Forbear to cease or languish yet,
Though soon you must and will
By Sestos town, in Hero’s tower,
On Hero’s heart Leander lies;
The signal torch has burned its hour
And sputters as it dies.
Beneath him, in the nighted firth,
Between two continents complain
The seas he swam from earth to earth
And he must swim again.
XVI.
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.
XVII.
Bells in tower at evening toll,
And the light forsakes the soul;
Soon will evening’s self be gone
And the whispering night come on.
Blame not thou the faulting light
Nor the whispers of the night:
Though the whispering night were still,
Yet the heart would counsel ill.
XVIII.
Delight it is in youth and May
To see the morn arise,
And more delight, or so they say,
To read in lovers’ eyes.
Oh maiden, let your distaff be,
And pace the flowery meads with me,
And I will tell you lies.
’Tis blithe to see the sunshine fail,
And hear the land grow still
And listen till the nightingale
Is heard beneath the hill.
Oh follow me where she is flown
Into the leafy w
oods alone,
And I will work you ill.
XIX.
The mill-stream, now that noises cease,
Is all that does not hold its peace;
Under the bridge it murmurs by,
And here are night and hell and I.
Who made the world I cannot tell:
’Tis made, and here am I in hell.
My hand, though now my knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed.
And so, no doubt, in time gone by
Some have suffered more than I,
Who only spend the night alone
And strike my fist upon the stone.
XX.
Like min, the veins of these that slumber
Leapt once with dancing fires divine;
The blood of all this noteless number
Ran red like mine.
How still, with every pulse in station,
Frost in the founts that used to leap,
The thralls of night, the perished nation,
How sound they sleep!
These too, these veins which life convulses,
Wait but a while, shall cease to bound;
I with the ice in all my pulses
Shall sleep as sound.
XXI.
The world goes none the lamer,
