When I Watch The Living Meet

Not much sleep last night. When I did manage to shut my eyes for a few minutes of agitated REM, I dreamt I was 20 again, and I was living inside A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman.

This poem kept resounding in my head:


XII. When I watch the living meet


WHEN I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

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

A Shropshire Lad

Continuing on the A.E. Housman theme from yesterday, here is a little poem about a book I had lost and then rediscovered in Connecticut, as I was getting ready to move back to New York.



A Shropshire Lad

Digging through a damp, decaying box
Of poetry books stored in the garage,
I found the one I had been looking for
Grown rather green and moldy—an image

Which might have raised a ghostly smile beneath
The author’s clipped Victorian moustache.
How perfect Housman was the moldy one!
My only one! Lord, how we might have laughed!