“Breath’s a ware that won’t keep./Up, lad: when the journey’s over/There’ll be time enough to sleep”

For Poetry Monday, from another initials poet it’s three for the price of one:


from A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman:

XXXII

From far, from eve and morning
    And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
    Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
    Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
    What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
    How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
    I take my endless way.

XL

Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
    And cannot come again.

LX

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
    And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
    And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
    Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
    There’s nothing but the night.


This is one of a couple clusters of separated poems that I see as clearly resonating together, to the point that I sometimes think of them as sections of what was initially a larger poem, or maybe sequence, that was split up for whatever editorial reason. Another such cluster is VI, XVI, and LVII.

---L.

Subject slightly misquoted from Reveille, A.E. Housman.