Charles Fonteyn Manney: A Shropshire Lad (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)


Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Input by Ted Perry

?. Disillusion

Language: English

Authorship

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

A Shropshire Lad

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Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly;
Why should men make haste to die?
Empty heads and tongues a-talking
Make the rough road easy walking,
And the feather pate of folly
Bears the falling sky.

Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking
Spins the heavy world around.
If young hearts were not so clever,
Oh, they would be young for ever;
Think no more; 'tis only thinking
Lays lads underground.

?. Youth

Language: English

Authorship

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

A Shropshire Lad

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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy [springs]¹ a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

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¹ Manton: "years"

?. Exile

Language: English

Authorship

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

A Shropshire Lad

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White in the moon the long road lies,
 The moon stands blank above;
White in the moon the long road lies
 That leads me from my love.
 
Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
 Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
 Pursue the ceaseless way.
 
The world is round, so travellers tell,
 And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,
 The way will guide one back.
 
But ere the circle homeward hies
 Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
 That leads me from my love.

Input by Ted Perry

?. Grief

Language: English

Authorship

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

A Shropshire Lad

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With rue my heart is laden
 For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
 And many a lightfood lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
 The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping 
 In fields where roses fade.

?. Heart wounds

Language: English

Authorship

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)

A Shropshire Lad

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When I was one-and-twenty
 I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
 But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
 But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
 No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
 I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
 Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
 And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
 And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.