October Verse

The Cutting Edge - pencil drawing by Nigel A JAMESFrom A Shropshire Lad

Loitering With Vacant Eye

A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. Some of the better known poems are “To an Athlete Dying Young”, “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” and “When I was One-and-Twenty”. The collection was published in 1896. The main theme of A Shropshire Lad is mortality, and so living life to its fullest! After all, death can strike at any time!

Loitering With a Vacant Eye is less known, but just as meaningful and deep!


Loitering With a Vacant Eye

Loitering with a vacant eye
Along the Grecian gallery,
And brooding on my heavy ill,
I met a statue standing still.
Still in marble stone stood he,
And steadfastly he looked at me.
`Well met,' I thought the look would say,
`We both were fashioned far away;
We neither knew, when we were young,
These Londoners we live among.'


Still he stood and eyed me hard,
An earnest and a grave regard:
`What, lad, drooping with your lot?
I too would be where I am not.
I too survey that endless line
Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.
Years, ere you stood up from rest,
On my neck the collar prest;
Years, when you lay down your ill,
I shall stand and bear it still.
Courage, lad, 'tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong.'
So I thought his look would say;
And light on me my trouble lay,
And I stepped out in flesh and bone
Manful like the man of stone.

njmailboy@gmail.com