War Poet

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed,
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down:
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town

March 1942

A nature poet by inclination, Sidney Keyes was drawn to the work of Holderlin and Rilke, taking them -paradoxically- to war against the Germans. They draw out his essentially Wordsworthian temperament; he was also touched by the very different imaginative worlds of Schiller and Paul Klee. A passion for the microcosmic co-exists with an ability to deal with large truths in his own voice or to enter into the imagination of other, of Clare and Yeats for example. Though he died young, his achievement is real. His dramatic monologues, his poems of landscape, of the weird and macabre, and his amstery of blank verse set him apart.