A. E. Housman Quotes

Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, But keep your fancy free.

Tomorrow, more's the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.

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.

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.

How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day. To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before. Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.

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.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, He stood and counted them and cursed his luck; And then the clock collected in the tower Its strength, and struck.

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.

Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure.

Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, I'd face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good.

There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.

Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.

When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep.

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.

The bells they sound on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.

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.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

Ten thousand times I've done my best and all's to do again.

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

I sought them far and found them, The sure, the straight, the brave, The hearts I lost my own to, The souls I could not save They braced their belts about them, They crossed in ships the sea, They sought and found six feet of ground, And there they died for me.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.

If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude.

Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and die No star is lost at all From all the star-sown sky. The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea And still the sea is salt.

On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.

Good night; ensured release, Imperishable peace, Have these for yours. * While sky and sea and land And earth's foundations stand And heaven endures. *These three lines are on the tablet over Housman's grave in the parish church at Ludlow, Shropshire, England

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

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

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.

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