Poetry meme

[flemmings]

Toss-up between this and 'On Wenlock Edge', but this one wins by a nose.

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.
-AE Housman, More Poems

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

My god- that *is* fast. Norway clearly Rates with our post office.

[incandescens]

Neat. Layered meanings. Haven't come across that one before. Thanks.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

You haven't? History is made. More Poems is worth looking at- it's all the ones he never intended to publish and that have a certain bitterness to them in consequence. Has 'Good creatures, do you love your lives' (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/housman.html#MPxxvi) and that lovely epitaph:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

[incandescens]

That Good Creatures one -- nice. Hadn't come across it before. Had seen that epitaph, and it is lovely, yes.

(coughs) And I'm not that well-read, really.