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On Your Midnight Pallet Lying

A. E. Housman

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.
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From A Shropshire Lad | 1896
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