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.


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