A. E. Housman - Day Quotes

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His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.

A. E. Housman
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

A. E. Housman
You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over; You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover. 'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never: I shall have lived a little while Before I die for ever.

A. E. Housman
But since the man that runs away
Lives to die another day.

A. E. Housman
'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
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.

A. E. Housman
The candles burn their sockets,
The blinds let through the day,
The young man feels his pockets
And wonders what's to pay.

A. E. Housman
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

A. E. Housman
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high, we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

A. E. Housman
It is supposed that there has been progress in the science of textual criticism, and the most frivolous pretender has learned to talk superciliously about "the old unscientific days". The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile is empty of reflexion and stuffed with self-complacency.

A. E. Housman