I, a stranger and afraid ... In a world I never made

I wasn't even reading an essay or a poem when I came across these profound words.

I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made

Instead, it was in an animation (ht) that I have embedded here:


A World I Never Made from Rachel Kwak on Vimeo.

Curiosity being my metaphorical middle name, I searched for more info about this animation, and came across this in practically no time all:

Animator Rachel Kwak painstakingly created the elaborate part flip-book short film,  A World I Never Made, for her final project at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  The inventive piece combines an animated story based on English poet A.E. Housman‘s book of the same name and an actual copy of the book that houses the poem. Silhouettes of rabbits  jump right off the page in seeming synchronicity to the song Eon Blue Apocalypse by Tool.
Her former Experimental Animation professor at Pratt Institute, Robert Lyons, explains:

…this film is a beautiful example of visual poetry. A variety of techniques are employed including; cut-outs, hand-drawn, stop motion and replacement animation.

 Yes, I like the descriptor "visual poetry" ...

So, back to the quote; another search reveals the rest of the lines from the poem by Housman

The Laws of God
THE laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I , and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

Ignorant about pretty much everything, I am not surprised that I have never heard of Housman.  So, another search .... I liked this YouTube clip; it is so wonderful to hear the poem being read, as opposed to the eyes scanning the printed words