Personal Choice Volume 2 No.29

A Shropshire Lad 35: On the idle hill of summer

By A. E. Housman

On the idle hill of summer,

      Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

      Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

      On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder,

      Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten

      Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

Lovely lads and dead and rotten;

      None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,

      High the screaming fife replies,

Gay the files of scarlet follow:

      Woman bore me, I will rise.

Alfred Edward Housman (1859 – 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by publishing as a private scholar at first. Later Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. He is now acknowledged as one of the foremost classicists of his age. In 1896 he emerged as a poet with A Shropshire Lad, a cycle in which he poses as an unsophisticated and melancholy youth. After a slow start, this captured the imagination of young readers, its preoccupation with early death appealing to them especially during times of war. In 1922 his Last Poems added to his reputation, which was further enhanced by the large number of song settings drawn from these collections. Following his death, further poems from his notebooks were published by his brother, Laurence.