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The fairies break their dances And leave the printed lawn.
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
Fairy
Angel
Leave
Fairies
Break
Faerie
Lawn
Dances
Lawns
Printed
More quotes by A. E. Housman
Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
A. E. Housman
We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A. E. Housman
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
The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
Who made the world I cannot tell 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
A. E. Housman
His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
Look not in my eyes, for fear They mirror true the sight I see, And there you find your face too clear And love it and be lost like me.
A. E. Housman
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
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
Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.
A. E. Housman
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.
A. E. Housman
All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
A. E. Housman
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.
A. E. Housman
