A. E. Housman Quotes
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But if you ever come to a road where danger; Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share. Be good to the lad who loves you true, And the soul that was born to die for you; And whistle and I'll be there.
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Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.
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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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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 difference between an icicle and a red-hot poker is really much slighter than the difference between truth and falsehood or sense and nonsense; yet it is much more immediately noticeable and much more universally noticed, because the body is more sensitive than the mind.
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Far in a western brooklandThat bred me long agoThe poplars stand and trembleBy pools I used to know.
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Tell me not here, it needs not saying,What tune the enchantress playsIn aftermaths of soft SeptemberOr under blanching mays,For she and I were long acquaintedAnd I knew all her ways.
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Happy bridegroom, Hesper bringsAll desired and timely things.All whom morning sends to roam,Hesper loves to lead them home.Home return who him behold,Child to mother, sheep to fold,Bird to nest from wandering wide:Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.
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He stood, and heard the steepleSprinkle the quarters on the morning town.One, two, three, four, to market-place and peopleIt tossed them down.Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;And then the clock collected in the towerIts strength, and struck.
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Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
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The bells they sound on BredonAnd still the steeples hum.'Come all to church, good people,' -Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;I hear you, I will come.
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
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There, like the wind through woods in riot,Through him the gale of life blew high;The tree of man was never quiet:Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
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Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,Gold that I never see;Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedgeThat will not shower on me.
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The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world.
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To be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think; and though it also requires other things, those things are supplements and cannot be substitutes. Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.
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His folly has not fellowBeneath the blue of dayThat gives to man or womanHis heart and soul away.
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With rue my heart is ladenFor golden friends I had,For many a rose-lipt maidenAnd many a lightfoot lad.By brooks too broad for leapingThe lightfoot boys are laid;The rose-lipt girls are sleepingIn fields where roses fade.
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And how am I to face the oddsOf man’s bedevilment and God’s?I, a stranger and afraidIn a world I never made.
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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.
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I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.
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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.
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If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude.