An End of Roaming

I always journey into the autumn season with a poet.  Last year it was Mary Oliver; the year before that it was Robert Frost...nothing cutting edge or out-of-the-ordinary.  I'm afraid my taste in poetry is kind of basic and old-fashioned, in part due to lack of wider exposure.  And I like it to rhyme--which is sorely out of vogue.  This year, I've returned to that old cynic, A.E. Housman--some of whose poetry I memorized many years ago.  This one is beautiful if you have the patience to read all the way to the fifth verse and beyond.

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

And look 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.

~A.E. Housman