“watch the sun rise / running in the shadows / damn your love damn your lies”

For Poetry Monday:

“Her strong enchantments failing,” A.E. Housman

Her strong enchantments failing,
    Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
    And the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness
    Begins to shrill and cry,
“O young man, O my slayer,
    To-morrow you shall die.”

O Queen of air and darkness,
    I think ’tis truth you say,
And I shall die to-morrow;
    But you will die to-day.


My favorite Housman poem not from A Shropshire Lad, and a strikingly compact harness of myth to deal with private demons. As a gauge of just how deep Housman’s mythopoesis could run, this is where the title Queen of Air and Darkness was coined—it really isn’t old lore.

---L.

Subject quote from The Chain, Fleetwood Mac.