A Shropshire Lad XII: When I watch the living meet

By A. E. Housman 1859–1936

When I watch the living meet,

And the moving pageant file

Warm and breathing through the street

Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust

In the house of flesh are strong,

Let me mind the house of dust

Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not

Nothing stands that stood before;

There revenges are forgot,

And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two and two

Ask not whom they sleep beside,

And the bridegroom all night through

Never turns him to the bride.

Biography

At first glance nothing seems more unlikely than that the poet of the enormously popular A Shropshire Lad should be the classical scholar A. E. Housman. This Cambridge University professor of Latin left no doubt as to his priorities: the emendation of classical texts was both an intellectual search for the truth and his life's work; poetry was an emotional and physiological experience that began with a sensation in the pit of . . .

Continue reading this biography