Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
A. E. HOUSMANNow hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.
More A. E. Housman Quotes
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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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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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The fairies break their dances And leave the printed lawn.
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They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.
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Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
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Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
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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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Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.
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Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
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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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Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
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Stone, steel, dominions pass, Faith too, no wonder; So leave alone the grass That I am under.
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The thoughts of others Were light and fleeting, Of lovers’ meeting Or luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady; So I was ready When trouble came.
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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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Give me a land of boughs in leaf A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land.
A. E. HOUSMAN