豪斯曼詩歌選

Alfred Edward Housman was born in a village in rural Shropshire, England in 1859. As a student at Oxford, he distinguished himself as a promising scholar of classics, though crises of a personal nature caused him to fail his final exams. Housman was determined to overcome this failing. When not working at the British Patent office Housman wrote scholarly articles, and published many of them to very high regard from those in academic circles. He was invited to teach at the University of London as a professor of Latin, and soon stepped up to Cambridge University, to retire to the life of a shy academic. He published only two volumes of poetry --A Shropshire Lad in 1898 and Last Poems in 1922 -- yet these were instantly and enormously popular. However successful he was, the tone of his poems remained that of the Latin poets he admired: that life is short and often, inexplicably, comes to a bad end.
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    When I Was One-and-Twenty
    When I was one-and-twenty
    I heard a wise man say,
    "Give crowns and pounds and guineas
    But not your heart away;
    Give pearls away and rubies
    But keep your fancy free."
    But I was one-and-twenty,
    No use to talk to me.
    When I was one-and-twenty
    I heard him say again,
    "The heart out of the bosom
    Was never given in vain;
    'Tis paid with sighs a-plenty
    And sold for endless rue."
    And I am two-and-twenty,
    And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.