In lyrical and elegant language A.E. Housman penned his melancholic poem,

When Summer’s End Is Nighing.

He used the gradual and predictable process of the changing seasons,

from summer to autumn, as metaphor to portray

the inevitable process of life to death.

 

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When Summer’s End Is Nighing

by A. E. Housman

 

When summer’s end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.

So here’s an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer’s parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.

 

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(image from darrow.law.umn.edu)

Alfred Edward (A. E.) Housman, 1859 – 1936

Classicist.  Scholar.  Poet.

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