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.
Alfred Edward Housman Quotes
Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act… The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
To think that two and two are four, And neither five nor three, The heart of man has long been sore, And long ’tis like to be.
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither know nor care.
Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
And malt does more than Milton can To justify the ways of God to man.
Oh, I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where And carried, halfway home or near Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer; Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I’ve lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the […]
That habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies which men share with sheep.
