As through the wild green hills of Wyre
The train ran, changing sky and shire,
And far behind, a fading crest,
Low in the forsaken west
Sank the high-reared head of Clee,
My hand lay empty on my knee.
Aching on my knee it lay:
That morning half a shire away
So many an honest fellow’s fist
Had well-nigh wrung it from the wrist.
Hand, said I, since now we part
From fields and men we know by heart,
For strangers’ faces, strangers’ lands,–
Hand, you have held true fellows’ hands.
Be clean then; rot before you do
A thing they’ll not believe of you.
You and I must keep from shame
In London streets the Shropshire name;
On banks of Thames they must not say
Severn breeds worse men than they;
And friends abroad must bear in mind
Friends at home they leave behind.
Oh, I shall be stiff and cold
When I forget you, hearts of gold;
The land where I shall mind you not
Is the land where all’s forgot.
And if my foot returns no more
To Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,
Luck, my lads, be with you still
By falling stream and standing hill,
By chiming tower and whispering tree,
Men that made a man of me.
About your work in town and farm
Still you’ll keep my head from harm,
Still you’ll help me, hands that gave
A grasp to friend me to the grave.
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad, wistfully evokes the constraints and limited choices of youth in the English countryside. The simplicity and distinctive imagery of the writing appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers, both before and after the First World War