A Shropshire Lad, by Alfred Housman

"All poetry is putting the infinite within the finite." --Robert Browning.

Alfred Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896. The work includes "Is My Team Ploughing," "The Carpenter’s Son," "To An Athlete Dying Young" and "Into My Heart an Air that Kills."

"Into My Heart an Air That Kills"

Into my heart and 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.

Housman’s poetry is marked by a simple, even pristine use of words, with the result that his clarity of expression is unmatched. He tends to be melancholy, and his themes include death and dying. He also treats topics like youth and love however, and poems like "Is My Team Ploughing" have a humorous cast. He believed poetry was indefinable: "I can no more define poetry," he said, "than a terrier can define a rat."

Anti-war poems are among his most emotive: "Grenadier" was published in Last Poems.

"Grenadier"

The Queen she sent to look for me,

The sergeant he did say,

‘Young man a soldier will you be

For thirteen pence a day?’

For thirteen pence a day did I

Take off the things I wore,

And I have marched to where I lie,

And shall march no more.

My mouth is dry, my shirt is wet,

My blood runs all away,

So now I shall not die in debt

For thirteen pence a day.

Tomorrow after new young men

The sergeant he must see,

For things will all be over then,

Between the Queen and me.

And I shall have to bate my price,

For in the grave, they say,

Is neither knowledge nor device,

Nor thirteen pence a day.