XV
Look not in my eyes, for fearThey mirror true the sight I see,And there you find your face too clearAnd love it and be lost like me.One the long nights through must lieSpent in star-defeated sighs,But why should you as well as IPerish? gaze not in my eyes.A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,One that many loved in vain,Looked into a forest wellAnd never looked away again.There, where the turf in springtime flowers,With downward eye and gazes sad,Stands amid the glancing showersA 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. HousmanWhich puts me in a terrible fix,No woman ever stood a chance with HousmanAnd he's been dead since 1936.
-Wendy Cope
I think Wendy Cope has a Collected Poems being issued here this fall? IIRC? Coincidentally, I just listened to an older episode of the Backlisted podcast and one of the hosts was mentioning having found an old LP recording of Shropshire Lad and how lovely it was to hear aloud.
ReplyDeleteOoh. I hadn't heard about the collected Wendy Cope. I'll have to keep an eye out.
DeleteLove both poems. :D
ReplyDeleteGlad you liked them!
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