Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Great Regulars: This week's poem is my favourite of

A.E. Housman's superbly melancholy lyrics. The poem beginning "When summer's end is nighing" is numbered but untitled, like all the others in the 1922 collection, Last Poems, Housman compiled and published this collection specifically so it could be read by Moses Jackson, the object of his life-long, probably unrequited love, who, by this time, lay terminally ill in Canada.

The metre is typical of Housman's most sigh-laden style: iambic trimeter, with alternating feminine and masculine endings.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: When summer's end is nighing by A.E. Housman

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