Limerick

There once was a man from Manhattan,

Who always dined with his hat on.

When asked to remove it,

He said to reprove it, 

Off my head it will surely get sat on.

A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad XXX And My Attempt At Paraphrasing It Stanza By Stanza

 A Shropshire Lad 30/63    

A.E. Houseman

Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

——————

My shot at a paraphrase, stanza by stanza:

I’m not the first who desired to stir up things more than I dared to do. If on this windless night I am without breath and shiver, I and others have done so before. It all comes from inside me.

Many more than I, if you want to know the truth, have run cold with fear and hot with desire, as though we were a horse with the reins on us of icy fear and hot desire at war with each other, keeping us hopelessly fixed to a spot from which we can’t move.

As I have this feverish sickness, so have others.  And I like them shall get my way in the end, to where I moulder in the grave where the iciness of fear and the heat of desire don’t exist.

But as for now, the prospect of death quenching fear and desire offers me no breeze of balm or cooling restoration across my fevered forehead. Hot desire and icy fear still clash inside me, as though the windless night itself is smothering me such that I can’t breath.