greykit.poetry — A E Housman

• 1896 [a-e-housman] Into my heart an air that kills
  A Shropshire Lad

  The blue remembered hills of the land of lost content, shining plain from far away — and the flat admission that closes it: I cannot come again.

  #lyric#exile#memory#1890s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
  A Shropshire Lad

  Counting his threescore years and ten, the speaker finds fifty springs too few to see the cherry hung with bloom and snow — and resolves to go about the woodlands now.

  #lyric#nature#mortality#spring#1890s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
  A Shropshire Lad

  The same gale that troubles Wenlock Edge blew through a Roman at Uricon: the tree of man was never quiet, and the gale of life will soon be through this one too.

  #lyric#nature#mortality#1890s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] To an Athlete Dying Young
  A Shropshire Lad

  A Shropshire lad mourns a young runner carried home shoulder-high in triumph, and again shoulder-high in death — lucky, Housman suggests, to slip away before the garland withers and the name outlives the fame.

  #elegy#death#youth#lyric#1890s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] When I was one-and-twenty
  A Shropshire Lad

  A young man ignores the wise man's counsel to keep his heart free — and finds out at two-and-twenty that 't is true, 't is true.

  #lyric#love#youth#regret#1890s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] With rue my heart is laden
  A Shropshire Lad

  Eight lines for the golden friends and the light-foot boys and rose-lipt girls, laid by brooks too broad for leaping and in fields where roses fade.

  #lyric#grief#youth#1890s