Oh fair enough are sky and plain poem – A. E. Housman

Oh fair enough are sky and plain,

But I know fairer far:

Those are as beautiful again

That in the water are;

The pools and rivers wash so clean

The trees and clouds and air,

The like on earth was never seen,

And oh that I were there.

These are the thoughts I often think

As I stand gazing down

In act upon the cressy brink

To strip and dive and drown;

But in the golden-sanded brooks

And azure meres I spy

A silly lad that longs and looks

And wishes he were I.

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Alfred Edward Houseman

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad, wistfully evokes the constraints and limited choices of youth in the English countryside. The simplicity and distinctive imagery of the writing appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers, both before and after the First World War

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