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.

These lines are from A. E. Housman’s late poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” written in the aftermath of the First World War and first published in 1917. Housman (1859–1936), a classical scholar and poet known for his austere lyric voice, was deeply skeptical about human nature and the consolations of religion. The poem is framed as a tribute to professional soldiers who, when “the world was at its worst,” did their duty without illusion. The quoted stanza shifts from public commemoration to a private, existential confession, articulating the speaker’s sense of vulnerability before both human cruelty and divine inscrutability.

The speaker confronts a double threat: “man’s bedevilment” (human malice, violence, and moral corruption) and “God’s” (the troubling possibility that the universe is governed by a power indifferent or hostile to human hopes). The question “how am I to face the odds” casts life as an unequal contest in which the individual is outmatched. The closing admission—“a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made”—distills Housman’s characteristic bleakness: we are thrown into existence without consent, lacking mastery over the conditions that shape us. The lines’ plain diction and tight rhyme intensify their fatalistic clarity, turning wartime reflection into a general statement of existential alienation.