Postscript For Gweno
If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
'He has forgotten me'.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side; *Biblical allusion
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.
Alun Lewis was a pacifist who nevertheless joined the Royal
Engineers in 1940. He wrote this poem for his wife, Gweno,
before he went away to war and his eventual death (a possible
suicide) in Burma in 1944. Some have speculated that his
unexplained death was a suicide – an act of despair after his
infidelity towards Gweno after meeting a married woman called
Frieda. This poem however appears to affirm a love based on a
strong sense of fidelity that cannot be broken. Is there perhaps
a degree of despair borne out of guilt that comes through
however?
Whilst this is undoubtedly a love poem there is such
underlying suffering expressed by the diction, with the use of
If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
'He has forgotten me'.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side; *Biblical allusion
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.
Alun Lewis was a pacifist who nevertheless joined the Royal
Engineers in 1940. He wrote this poem for his wife, Gweno,
before he went away to war and his eventual death (a possible
suicide) in Burma in 1944. Some have speculated that his
unexplained death was a suicide – an act of despair after his
infidelity towards Gweno after meeting a married woman called
Frieda. This poem however appears to affirm a love based on a
strong sense of fidelity that cannot be broken. Is there perhaps
a degree of despair borne out of guilt that comes through
however?
Whilst this is undoubtedly a love poem there is such
underlying suffering expressed by the diction, with the use of
