Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.

A. E. Housman

Categorized in : Son Lying Mother

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, He stood and counted them and cursed his luck; And then the clock collected in the tower Its strength, and struck.

A. E. Housman

towers strength luck

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.

A. E. Housman

stranger made world

The fairies break their dances And leave the printed lawn.

A. E. Housman

break fairy angel

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

A. E. Housman

drinking food book

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

A. E. Housman

sarcastic air funny

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

A. E. Housman

dust beer sky

And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.

A. E. Housman

silence cheer sound

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

A. E. Housman

lyric-poetry spring love

'Tis spring; come out to ramble

A. E. Housman

easter spring wind

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.

A. E. Housman

strong morning beautiful

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.

A. E. Housman

humorous hands world

This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not.

A. E. Housman

ill humorous trouble

They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

A. E. Housman

lad glory men

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.

A. E. Housman

meat cooking food

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

A. E. Housman

poetry art thinking

Look not in my eyes, for fear

A. E. Housman

mirrors eye love

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

A. E. Housman

wearing-white twenties years

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.

A. E. Housman

vibrations peculiar thinking

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

A. E. Housman

poetry-is said way

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.

A. E. Housman

reading book needs