Clay Lies Still, but Blood's a Rover

I haven't memorized much poetry, for all my love of it.  My brother-in-law has memorized huge gobs of Shakespeare (or had, I'll have to ask Jim how much he still remembers). But I can't seems to make them stick, as much as I try.  When I was in school, our class had to recite Invictus by William Ernest Henley ("Out of the night that covers me. . . . "), The only thing worse was twenty of us, each giving the poem our own halting translation,   but I have remembered it, for all these years.  The second bit of poetry I found as a Freshman at the University of Maine written on a desk in an auditoreum.  I had no idea who wrote it or where it came from.  For years I assumed that it was a verse from a rock song which I was, naturally, ignorant of.  (Funny sidebar, when I came to school, I wrote my name on each record in my collection of mostly Gregorian chants and movie soundtracks, just in case anybody wanted to borrow them.  Oh Lord, what a simpleton!)

So it was with great joy that years afterwards I was reading a copy of the Collected Poems of A. E. Housman and realized that at last I had found the source of my quote.  I don't know how many times I had drug myself out of bed with the last stanza of this poem in my ear.  There is good anglo-saxon alliteration in the rest of the poem, I realize now.  The same marching of syllables that makes Beowulf such a joy (in good translation anyway).  Well, here is the poem, whole cloth.  I don't think I will ever remember the rest of the poem, or forget the end.

REVEILLE

by A.E. Housman

Wake: the silver dusk returning

Up the beach of darkness brims,

And the ship of sunrise burning

Strands upon the easter rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,

Trampled to the floor it spanned,

And the tent of night in tatters

Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:

Hear the drums of morning play;

Hark, the empty highways crying

'Who'll beyond the hills away?'

Towns and countries woo together,

Forelands beacon, belfries call;

Never lad that trod the leather

Lived to feast his heart with all.

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber

Sunlit pallets never thrive;

Morns abed and daylight slumber

Were not meant for man alive.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;

Breath's a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey's over

There'll be time enough to sleep.