flemmings | (no subject)

Oh- this is national poetry month in Britain. Excellent. October is far more poetic than April. I shall call on my honourary English citizenship (from my paternal grandparents, not that the EC will give me citizenship for either of my bloodlines grump) and post melancholy poetry.

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.
--AE Housman

(Maybe I should throw in some Auden as a corrective?

Just the same, I am very glad I shall never
Be twenty and have to go through that business again,
The hours of fuss and fury, the conceit, the expense.)

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Ah, cool!

(I suspect you meant veins, rather than reins, in the second stanza?)

Housman wrote 'reins'. An archaic term for the kidneys, wikipedia says (still has that meaning in French) but he was probably using it as a figure for the whole *cough* pelvic region. Since it's perfectly clear to *me* what the source of Housman's anguish is, here.

Of course he might have meant it as a synonym for bowels...

Oh, sorry-- my mistake and that's very cool.

Poor Housman.

Yes, indeed, poor Housman. (Who could still be horrible to people whose scholarship he disagreed with, and not at all aware how horrible he was being.) The Victorian attitude to homosexuality was bad enough without all the 'I loved him and he didn't love back' complication.