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XI. [On your midnight pallet lying]

by A. E. Housman, 1896

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.

Published in A Shropshire Lad
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