Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.
More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.
Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.
But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.
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