Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.

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.

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

The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.

With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.

Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.