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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.

A. E. Housman

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A. E. Housman
Age: 77 †
Born: 1859
Born: January 1
Died: 1936
Died: January 1
Classical Philologist
Classical Scholar
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
A. E. Housman
Stars
Drop
Dies
Helps
Fall
Faults
Sown
Lost
Sky
Rains
Helping
Star
Primal
Stills
Rain
Toil
Still
Sea
Salt
Seen
Fault

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On Wenlock Edge the wood's in troubleHis forest fleece the Wrekin heavesThe wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
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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.
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But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts. And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts
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Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
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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
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist) and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
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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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The fairies break their dances And leave the printed lawn.
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Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
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They say my verse is sad: no wonder Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man's.
A. E. Housman
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And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.
A. E. Housman
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Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust Bear the fruit that bear you must Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
A. E. Housman
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Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
A. E. Housman
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The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
A. E. Housman
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'Tis spring come out to ramble The hilly brakes around, For under thorn and bramble About the hollow ground The primroses are found. And there's the windflower chilly With all the winds at play, And there's the Lenten lily That has not long to stay And dies on Easter day.
A. E. Housman
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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.
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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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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.
A. E. Housman
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To justify God's ways to man.
A. E. Housman
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June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.
A. E. Housman