Цитаты из книги A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems

I Counsel You Beware Good creatures, do you love your lives And have you ears for sense? Here is a knife like other knives, That cost me eighteen pence. I need but stick it in my heart And down will come the sky, And earth’s foundations will depart And all you folk will die.

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. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat…

Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not. If it were, the eighteenth century would have been able to write it better. As matters actually stand, who are the English poets of that age in whom preeminently one can hear and recognize the true poetic accent emerging clearly from the contemporary dialect? These four:…

If Housman were an emotion then, he would be longing. The recurrent impulse in these poems, abroad in ‘the friendless world’, in ‘the land of lost content’, is to touch – to touch flesh certainly – but even more simply to engage with another being, to achieve communion or wholeness before the grave’s embrace. These are…

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.

The mill-stream, now that noises cease, Is all that does not hold its peace; Under the bridge it murmurs by, And here are night and hell and I. Who made the world I cannot tell: ’Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed. And so, no doubt, in time gone by, Some…

It is no gift I tender, A loan is all I can; But do not scorn the lender; Man gets no more from man. Oh, mortal man may borrow What mortal man can lend; And ’twill not end to-morrow, Though sure enough ’twill end. If death and time are stronger A love may yet be strong; The world will last for longer, But this will last…