The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases
And I lie down alone.
The rainy Pleiads wester,
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of
That will not dream of me.
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