From Clee to heaven the beacon burns

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

I. From Clee to heaven the beacon burns

1887

FROM Clee to heaven the beacon burns,   The shires have seen it plain, From north and south the sign returns   And beacons burn again. Look left, look right, the hills are bright,         5   The dales are light between, Because ’tis fifty years to-night   That God has saved the Queen. Now, when the flame they watch not towers   About the soil they trod,         10 Lads, we ’ll remember friends of ours   Who shared the work with God. To skies that knit their heartstrings right,   To fields that bred them brave, The saviours come not home to-night         15   Themselves they could not save. It dawns in Asia, tombstones show   And Shropshire names are read; And the Nile spills his overflow   Beside the Severn’s dead.         20 We pledge in peace by farm and town   The Queen they served in war, And fire the beacons up and down   The land they perished for. ‘God save the Queen’ we living sing,         25   From height to height ’tis heard; And with the rest your voices ring,   Lads of the Fifty-third. Oh, God will save her, fear you not:   Be you the men you ’ve been,         30 Get you the sons your fathers got,   And God will save the Queen. The Clee Hills are the range of hills in southern Shropshire consisting of Brown Clee Hill and Titterstone Clee Hill. http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/content/image_galleries/clee_hills_gallery.shtml?1 The summit of Titterstone Clee is bleak, treeless and shaped by decades of quarrying. Many of the structures still remain, and lend to the ghostly atmosphere of the hill top, especially during the prolonged winter fogs that descend over the hills.