irreptitious
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.
* * *
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,
And ’twill not dream of me.
Some can gaze and not be sick,
But I could never learn the trick.
There’s this to say for blood and breath,
They give a man a taste for death.
More of Housman’s poems are available elsewhere; see also the fragment of a Greek tragedy & the (sadly abridged) ‘Application of Thought to Textual Criticism’. Rather unrelated: index to the Housman Society Journal, with the titles – but not the texts – of articles few people have time to read anyway.