Look not in my eyes, for fear

XV

Look not in my eyes, for fear

  They mirror true the sight I see,

And there you find your face too clear

  And love it and be lost like me.

One the long nights through must lie

  Spent in star-defeated sighs,

But why should you as well as I

  Perish? gaze not in my eyes.

 

A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,

  One that many loved in vain,

Looked into a forest well

  And never looked away again.

There, where the turf in springtime flowers,

   With downward eye and gazes sad,

Stands amid the glancing showers

  A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

 

-A. E. Housman

 

I was googling poems about eyes earlier in the week and reminded myself of this. The second stanza is a reference to Narcissus, who, of course, fell in love with his own image in a pond, and was so stationary from that time on, he was turned into a flower. A Shropshire Lad comes out in 1896, when Housman was 26, and presumably the first verse refers to the great, almost certainly Platonic, love of his early life, Moses Jackson.

 

I can't think of Housman without thinking of two other things. One is the Wendy Cope poem:

 

Another Unfortunate Choice 

I think I'm in love with A. E. Housman

Which puts me in a terrible fix,

No woman ever stood a chance with Housman

And he's been dead since 1936.

 

-Wendy Cope 

 

And the other thing Housman's very name brings to mind? The hilarious Fragment of a Greek Tragedy, of course. But that's for another day.