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

[larryhammer]

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.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Utterly gorgeous but living where I do, amongst the blue remembered hills, I would say that! :o)

[larryhammer]

:-P

[cmcmck]

Oh, and this:

IX.
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

[larryhammer]

Yup, that. But I already posted it, and this is (as best I can make it) a non-repeat meme.

[sovay]

Up, lad: when the journey’s over/There’ll be time enough to sleep

That links very clearly to LX for me, along with "Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

One of the best things I own is a published volume of Housman's manuscript poems, because it gave me all of these drafts.

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.

I wouldn't have thought to link them specifically, because they have always felt to me like part of the texture of Housman's recurring concerns, but certainly when you put them together they look like a miniature cycle. Neat.

[larryhammer]

"Reveille" is very much cut from the same fabric as the chestnut's torches. But in that case, it feels more of texture of those recurring concerns. I don't want to rabbithole the research necessary, but I suspect critical consensus is it's recurring and obsessive concerns all around.

[sartorias]

Twelve-winded sky!

In other news, I discovered that there is a Calibre Plug-in that will permit one to turn web serials into ebooks, called FanFicFare. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid to know how to put a plug-in into Calibre, much less how to fetch the web serials to covert, but I thought I'd pass that onto you, who actually has a brain.

[larryhammer]

I've been using a Chrome plugin called WebtoEpub, which can grab multiple chapters from a TOC and compile them into a .epub. It's smart enough to have default parsers for the major web serial sites as well as WordPress. (I have Calibre, but I only use it as a final step when publishing and so don't know the ins-and-outs.)

[sartorias]

Well, all that is Urdu for Stupid here, but I thought I'd pass it along.