Complete Poetical Works of a E Housman Page 6
But there he will lie as they laid him:
Where else could you trust him to sleep?
To sleep when the bugle is crying
And cravens have heard and are brave,
When mothers and sweethearts are sighing
And lads are in love with the grave.
Oh dark is the chamber and lonely,
And lights and companions depart;
But lief will he lose them and only
Behold the desire of his heart.
And low is the roof, but it covers
A sleeper content to repose;
And far from his friends and his lovers
He lies with the sweetheart he chose.
V. GRENADIER
The Queen she sent to look for me,
The sergeant he did say,
’Young man, a soldier will you be
For thirteen pence a day?’
For thirteen pence a day did I
Take off the things I wore,
And I have marched to where I lie,
And I shall march no more.
My mouth is dry, my shirt is wet,
My blood runs all away,
So now I shall not die in debt
For thirteen pence a day.
To-morrow after new young men
The sergeant he must see,
For things will all be over then
Between the Queen and me.
And I shall have to bate my price,
For in the grave, they say,
Is neither knowledge nor device
Nor thirteen pence a day.
VI. LANCER
I ‘listed at home for a lancer,
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
I ‘listed at home for a lancer
To ride on a horse to my grave.
And over the seas we were bidden
A country to take and to keep;
And far with the brave I have ridden,
And now with the brave I shall sleep.
For round me the men will be lying
That learned me the way to behave.
And showed me my business of dying:
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
They ask and there is not an answer;
Says I, I will ‘list for a lancer,
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
And I with the brave shall be sleeping
At ease on my mattress of loam,
When back from their taking and keeping
The squadron is riding home.
The wind with the plumes will be playing,
The girls will stand watching them wave,
And eyeing my comrades and saying
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
They ask and there is not an answer;
Says you, I will ‘list for a lancer,
Oh who would not sleep with the brave?
VII.
In valleys green and still
Where lovers wander maying
They hear from over hill
A music playing.
Behind the drum and fife,
Past hawthornwood and hollow,
Through earth and out of life
The soldiers follow.
The soldier’s is the trade:
In any wind or weather
He steals the heart of maid
And man together.
The lover and his lass
Beneath the hawthorn lying
Have heard the soldiers pass,
And both are sighing.
And down the distance they
With dying note and swelling
Walk the resounding way
To the still dwelling.
VIII.
Soldier from the wars returning,
Spoiler of the taken town,
Here is ease that asks not earning;
Turn you in and sit you down.
Peace is come and wars are over,
Welcome you and welcome all,
While the charger crops the clover
And his bridle hangs in stall.
Now no more of winters biting,
Filth in trench from fall to spring,
Summers full of sweat and fighting
For the Kesar or the King.
Rest you, charger, rust you, bridle;
Kings and kesars, keep your pay;
Soldier, sit you down and idle
At the inn of night for aye.
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.
X.
Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
XI.
Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.
Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.
XII.
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Now I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong,
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn or Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.<
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XIII. THE DESERTER
”What sound awakened me, I wonder,
For now ’tis dumb.”
”Wheels on the road most like, or thunder:
Lie down; ’twas not the drum.:
”Toil at sea and two in haven
And trouble far:
Fly, crow, away, and follow, raven,
And all that croaks for war.”
”Hark, I heard the bugle crying,
And where am I?
My friends are up and dressed and dying,
And I will dress and die.”
”Oh love is rare and trouble plenty
And carrion cheap,
And daylight dear at four-and-twenty:
Lie down again and sleep.”
”Reach me my belt and leave your prattle:
Your hour is gone;
But my day is the day of battle,
And that comes dawning on.
”They mow the field of man in season:
Farewell, my fair,
And, call it truth or call it treason,
Farewell the vows that were.”
”Ay, false heart, forsake me lightly:
’Tis like the brave.
They find no bed to joy in rightly
Before they find the grave.
”Their love is for their own undoing.
And east and west
They scour about the world a-wooing
The bullet in their breast.
”Sail away the ocean over,
Oh sail away,
And lie there with your leaden lover
For ever and a day.”
XIV. THE CULPRIT
The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.
The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.
My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang so high.
Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot,
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.
For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.
XV. EIGHT O’CLOCK
He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
XVI. SPRING MORNING
Star and coronal and bell
April underfoot renews,
And the hope of man as well
Flowers among the morning dews.
Now the old come out to look,
Winter past and winter’s pains.
How the sky in pool and brook
Glitters on the grassy plains.
Easily the gentle air
Wafts the turning season on;
Things to comfort them are there,
Though ’tis true the best are gone.
Now the scorned unlucky lad
Rousing from his pillow gnawn
Mans his heart and deep and glad
Drinks the valiant air of dawn.
Half the night he longed to die,
Now are sown on hill and plain
Pleasures worth his while to try
Ere he longs to die again.
Blue the sky from east to west
Arches, and the world is wide,
Though the girl he loves the best
Rouses from another’s side.
XVII. ASTRONOMY
The Wain upon the northern steep
Descends and lifts away.
Oh I will sit me down and weep
For bones in Africa.
For pay and medals, name and rank,
Things that he has not found,
He hove the Cross to heaven and sank
The pole-star underground.
And now he does not even see
Signs of the nadir roll
At night over the ground where he
Is buried with the pole
XVIII.
The rain, it streams on stone and hillock,
The boot clings to the clay.
Since all is done that’s due and right
Let’s home; and now, my lad, good-night,
For I must turn away.
Good-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal;
No league of ours, for sure.
Tomorrow I shall miss you less,
And ache of heart and heaviness
Are things that time should cure.
Over the hill the highway marches
And what’s beyond is wide:
Oh soon enough will pine to nought
Remembrance and the faithful thought
That sits the grave beside.
The skies, they are not always raining
Nor grey the twelvemonth through;
And I shall meet good days and mirth,
And range the lovely lands of earth
With friends no worse than you.
But oh, my man, the house is fallen
That none can build again;
My man, how full of joy and woe
Your mother bore you years ago
To-night to lie in the rain.
XIX.
In midnights of November,
When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh,
And danger in the valley,
And anger in the sky,
Around the huddling homesteads
The leafless timber roars,
And the dead call the dying
And finger at the doors.
Oh, yonder faltering fingers
Are hands I used to hold;
Their false companion drowses
And leaves them in the cold.
Oh, to the bed of ocean,
To Africk and to Ind,
I will arise and follow
Along the rainy wind.
The night goes out and under
With all its train forlorn;
Hues in the east assemble
And cocks crow up the morn.
The living are the living
And dead the dead will stay,
And I will sort with comrades
That face the beam of day.
XX.
The night is freezing fast,
To-morrow comes December;
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.
Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever,
And wears the turning globe.
XXI.
The fairies break their dances
And leave the printed lawn,
And up from India glances
The silver sail of dawn.
The candles burn their sockets,
The blinds let through the day,
The young man feels his pockets
And wonders what’s to pay.
XXII.
The sloe was lost in flower,
The April elm was dim;
That was the lover’s hour,
The hour for lies and him.
If thorns are all the bower,
Why, ’tis another’s hour,
The hour for truth and her.
XXIII.
In the morning, in the morning,
In the happy field of hay,
Oh they looked at one another
By the light of day.
In the blue and silver morning
On the haycock as they lay,
Oh they looked at one another
And they looked away.
XXIV. EPITHALAMIUM
He is here, Urania’s son,
Hymen come from Helicon;
God that glads the lover’s heart,
He is here to join and part.
So the groomsman quits your side
And the bridegroom seeks the bride:
Friend and comrade yield you o’er
To her that hardly loves you more.
Now the sun his skyward beam
Has tilted from the Ocean stream.
Light the Indies, laggard sun:
Happy bridegroom, day is done,
And the star from OEta’s steep
Calls to bed but not to sleep.
Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings
All desired and timely things.
All whom morning sends to roam,