There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
A. E. HousmanRead
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, He stood and counted them and cursed his luck; And then the clock collected in the tower Its strength, and struck.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the inevitability of time and fate amidst struggles and misfortune.
A. E. Housman's quote illustrates the tension between personal struggle and the unstoppable passage of time. The imagery of a man who, despite feeling trapped and cursed by his circumstances, recognizes the inevitability of time as the clock strikes, symbolizes the burdens we carry and the reality that life continues regardless of our own difficulties. It serves as a contemplation of how we face our fate, often feeling powerless against the passage of time and the events that transpire in our lives.
Themes
TimeFateStruggleInevitablePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
During a reflective speech on the inevitability of life's challenges.
More from A. E. Housman
All quotes βWho made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A. E. HousmanRead
Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
A. E. HousmanRead
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A. E. HousmanRead
Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking_x000D_ _x000D_ Spins the heavy world around.
A. E. HousmanRead
Similar quotes
The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
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We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.
Blaise PascalRead
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
Helene CixousRead
I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
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Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."We effectively became "time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers" with the invention of the clock."
Lewis MumfordRead
Man's chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.
Neville GoddardRead