Showing posts with label A. E. Housman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A. E. Housman. Show all posts

Saturday 29 October 2011

A. E. Housman and God

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


29 October 2011

The so-called 'scholar-poet', probably best known for A Shropshire Lad*, is said to have opined:


A malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man



Even so, one wonders which dram he had to hand - or, else, in mind - when he wrote (assuming that this was not a Johnsonian quip, noted by another)...


End-notes

* Somewhat tempting, in the reverse tendency to the title of The Winter's Tale, to type The Shropshire Lad - probably because, in the words 'a' and 'the', it is the same dull, unstressed vowel-sound, which peppers English speech (or, at any rate, British English), and so the variant title sounds very similar in my head.