Born in 1859 at Preston, Francis (Joseph) Thompson was educated at Owen's College, Manchester. Later he tried all manner of strange ways of earning a living. He was, at various times, assistant in a boot-shop, medical student, collector for a book seller and homeless vagabond; there was a period in his life when he sold matches on the streets of London. He was discovered in terrible poverty by the editor of a magazine to which he had sent some verses the year before. Almost immediately thereafter he became famous. His exalted mysticism is seen at its purest in "A Fallen Yew" and "The Hound of Heaven." Coventry Patmore, the distinguished poet of an earlier period, says of the latter poem, which is unfortunately too long to quote, "It is one of the very few great odes of which our language can boast." Thompson died, after a fragile and spasmodic life, in St. John's Wood in November, 1907. DAISY Where the thistle lifts a purple crown And the harebell shakes on the windy hill— The hills look over on the South, Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry She listened with big-lipped surprise, She knew not those sweet words she spake, Oh, there were flowers in Storrington But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. A berry red, a guileless look, A still word,-strings of sand! For standing artless as the air, The fairest things have fleetest end, But the rose's scent is bitterness She looked a little wistfully, 'Then went her sunshine way :The sea's eye had a mist on it, And the leaves fell from the day. She went her unremembering way, She left me marvelling why my soul Still, still I seemed to see her, still Nothing begins, and nothing ends, TO A SNOWFLAKE What heart could have thought you?— Past our devisal (O filigree petal!) From what Paradisal Too costly for cost? Who hammered you, wrought you, From argentine vapour?— "God was my shaper. He hammered, He wrought me, To lust of his mind: Thou couldst not have thought me! So purely, so palely, Tinily, surely, Mightily, frailly, Insculped and embossed, With His hammer of wind, A. E. Housman A. E. Housman was born March 26, 1859, and, after a classical education, he was, for ten years, a Higher Division Clerk in H. M. Patent Office. Later in life, he became a teacher. Housman has published only one volume of original verse, but that volume, A Shropshire Lad (1896), is known wherever modern English poetry is read. Underneath his ironies, there is a rustic humor that has many subtle variations. From a melodic standpoint, A Shropshire Lad is a collection of exquisite, haunting and almost perfect songs. Housman has been a professor of Latin since 1892 and, besides his immortal set of lyrics, has edited Juvenal and the books of Manilius. REVEILLÉ Wake: the silver dusk returning Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, Lived to feast his heart with all. Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY When I was one-and-twenty Give pearls away and rubies |