A. E. Housman Quotes
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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 bloomFifty springs are little room,About the woodlands I will goTo see the cherry hung with snow.
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Now hollow fires burn out to black,And lights are guttering low:Square your shoulders, lift your pack,And leave your friends and go.Oh never fear, man, nought's to dread,Look not to left nor right:In all the endless road you treadThere's nothing but the night.
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A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
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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.
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Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom along the bough.
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A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas. If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident.
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We now to peace and darknessAnd earth and thee restoreThy creature that thou madestAnd wilt cast forth no more.
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June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.
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That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
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These, in the day when heaven was falling,The hour when earth’s foundations fled,Followed their mercenary callingAnd took their wages and are dead.Their shoulders held the sky suspended;They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;What God abandoned, these defended,And saved the sum of things for pay.
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When I was one-and-twentyI heard a wise man say,'Give crowns and pounds and guineasBut not your heart away.'
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There, by the starlit fences,The wanderer halts and hearsMy soul that lingers sighingAbout the glimmering weirs.
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Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.
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In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
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But from my grave across my brow. Plays no wind of healing now,. And fire and ice within me fight. Beneath the suffocating night.
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Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck’s a chance, but trouble’s sureI’d face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.
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Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
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From far, from eve and morningAnd yon twelve-winded sky,The stuff of life to knit meBlew hither; here am I.
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Hope lies to mortalsAnd most believe her,But man's deceiverWas never mine.
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The rainy Pleiads wester,Orion plunges prone,The stroke of midnight ceases,And I lie down alone.
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And silence sounds no worse than cheersAfter earth has stopped the ears.
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Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.
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You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over; You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover. 'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never: I shall have lived a little while Before I die for ever.
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To-day, the road all runners come,Shoulder-high, we bring you home,And set you at your threshold down,Townsman of a stiller town.