A Shropshire Lad

Name: A Shropshire Lad
Author: Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward)

Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward)

Shropshire (England) -- Poetry

Afield for palms the girls repair,
          And sure enough the palms are there,
          And each will find by hedge or pond
          Her waving silver-tufted wand.

          In farm and field through all the shire
          The eye beholds the heart's desire;
          Ah, let not only mine be vain,
          For lovers should be loved again.



          XI

          On your midnight pallet lying
           Listen, and undo the door:
          Lads that waste the light in sighing
           In the dark should sigh no more;
          Night should ease a lover's sorrow;
          Therefore, since I go to-morrow;
           Pity me before.

          In the land to which I travel,
           The far dwelling, let me say-
          Once, if here the couch is gravel,
           In a kinder bed I lay,
          And the breast the darnel smothers
          Rested once upon another's
           When it was not clay.



          XII

          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.



          XIII

          When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard a wise man say,
          "Give crowns and pounds and guineas
           But not your heart away;
          Give pearls away and rubies
           But keep your fancy free."
          But I was one-and-twenty,
           No use to talk to me.

          When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard him say again,
          "The heart out of the bosom
           Was never given in vain;
          'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
           And sold for endless rue."
          And I am two-and-twenty,
           And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.



          XIV

          There pass the careless people
           That call their souls their own:
          Here by the road I loiter,
           How idle and alone.

          Ah, past the plunge of plummet,
           In seas I cannot sound,
          My heart and soul and senses,
           World without end, are drowned.

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

          There flowers no balm to sain him
           From east of earth to west
          That's lost for everlasting
           The heart out of his breast.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

A Shropshire Lad

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