A.E. Housman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose; But young men think it is, and we were young.

By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid.

Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think.

Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.

With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.

The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.

The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.