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
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