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Home  »  A Shropshire Lad  »  XI. On your midnight pallet lying

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

XI. On your midnight pallet lying

ON your midnight pallet lying,

Listen, and undo the door:

Lads that waste the light in sighing

In the dark should sigh no more;

Night should ease a lover’s sorrow;

Therefore, since I go to-morrow,

Pity me before.

In the land to which I travel,

The far dwelling, let me say—

Once, if here the couch is gravel,

In a kinder bed I lay,

And the breast the darnel smothers

Rested once upon another’s

When it was not clay.