XIX.

In midnights of November,
   When Dead man’s Fair is nigh,
And danger in the valley,
   And anger in the sky,

Around the huddling homesteads
   The leafless timber roars,
And the dead call the dying
   And finger at the doors.

Oh, yonder faltering fingers
   Are hands I used to hold;
Their false companion drowses
   And leaves them in the cold.

Oh, to the bed of ocean,
   To Africk and to Ind,
I will arise and follow
   Along the rainy wind.

The night goes out and under
   With all its train forlorn;
Hues in the east assemble
   And cocks crow up the morn.

The living are the living
   And dead the dead will stay,
And I will sort with comrades
   That face the beam of day.

A.E. Housman, Last Poems
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Public domain: first published in 1922.