Poem for May

Drummer Girl - pencil drawing by Nigel A  JAMES

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A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. Some of the better known poems are “On the Idle Hill of Summer”, “To an Athlete Dying Young”, “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” and “When I was One-and-Twenty”.

The collection was published in 1896. Housman originally called the work The Poems of Terence Hearsay, according to one of the characters portrayed, but, altered the title following a suggestion by his publisher.

The main theme of A Shropshire Lad is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time.

The poem I have chosen for May is “On the Idle Hill of Summer”

On The Idle Hill of Summer

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.

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