I'm usually not a poetry reader, but . . .

I recently was browsing and came across a reference to A. E. Housman, an English poet to whom many of you have been exposed, but perhaps not knowingly. I downloaded a copy of his poems (wireless via my Kindle); his complete works are brief.

Housman was first and foremost a classical Latin scholar, with poetry a sideline. He was also a religious skeptic and a closeted homosexual. He did not write/publish a great volume of poetry, and his poems are often melancholic and reflective of death, but also rejoice youth and love and speak to the urgency of life. His first published work was A Shropshire Lad, printed initially in 1894.

I read his complete works in a day. Some were straightforward. Many I had to read twice, and there are a couple that I still need to research a bit.

Here are some of Housman's poems you might be familiar with:

When I was one-and-twenty

  I heard a wise man say,

`Give crowns and pounds and guineas

  But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies

  But keep your fancy free.'

But I was one-and-twenty

  No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty

  I heard him say again,

`The heart out of the bosom

  Was never given in vain;

'Tis paid with sighs a plenty

  And sold for endless rue.'

And I am two-and-twenty

  And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

You probably know this one if you read or saw “Out of Africa”

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

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.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before the echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl's.

And of course:

Home is the sailor, home from sea:

  Her far-borne canvas furled

The ship pours shining on the quay

  The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:

  Fast in the boundless snare

All flesh lies taken at his will

  And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,

  The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

  The hunter from the hill.