Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A. E. HOUSMANLovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
More A. E. Housman Quotes
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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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Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
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Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
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He would not stay for me, and who can wonder? He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder, And went with half my life about my ways.
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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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I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
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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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To justify God’s ways to man.
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White in the moon the long road lies.
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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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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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Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
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Tomorrow, more’s the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.
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Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
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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.
A. E. HOUSMAN