Heartfelt handwritten lines from the war poet ‘fell into the lap’ of researcher who was trawling through theatre director’s letters

It is a poem of only eight lines, but those lines are filled with tender emotion for a young man who was the author’s lover. The words are all the more poignant as the poem dates from a time – the 1920s – when he could never have written openly of homosexual love.

The little known love poem is by Siegfried Sassoon, one of the greatest war poets, and is being published in full for the first time today in the Observer.

Half a century after Sassoon’s death, the untitled poem was rediscovered by Julian Richards, 26, a PhD student at Warwick University who was researching Glen Byam Shaw, to whom it was dedicated. Sassoon was then 39 and Shaw 20. A day after their first dinner together, Sassoon was already full of yearning for his young lover: “Though you have left me, I’m not yet alone:/ For what you were befriends the firelit room …”

Richards was sifting through hundreds of letters held by Cambridge University library when he came across one dated 24 October 1925. It contained a hand-written poem, and he was struck by its “heartfelt and personal” lines, with underlinings that emphasised emotions.

He said: “Sassoon writes in the letter of Shaw spending the evening before with him, before saying that he wrote a few lines, which he himself doesn’t seem to think of highly, for Shaw.”

Intrigued, Richards tried in vain to find any trace of the poem elsewhere. (After publication of this article, a reader pointed to part publication of the poem in Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon: a life.) The leading Sassoon expert has confirmed that the full poem is unpublished.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sassoon’s poem to Glen Byam Shaw. Classmark MS Add.9454/11. Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon. Photograph: Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, author of the acclaimed biography, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend, said: “I haven’t seen it before. What is important is that it’s written at a time when Sassoon believed that poetry had forsaken him. He finds it very difficult to write poetry in the 1920s. He’s been so successful as a war poet that he doesn’t really quite know where his poetry lies. He’s sort of grasping for a subject.”

Richards said that it was “incredibly exciting” to find this poem by such a great writer – a poet and novelist, best known for his antiwar poetry, such as “The Old Huntsman” (1917) and “Counter-Attack” (1918). Sassoon conveyed the brutality of war with shocking realism. Twice wounded, he received the Military Cross for bravery, but he wrote of hurling it into the River Mersey. He underwent psychiatric treatment and struggled to settle into civilian life. In his later years, his poetry was increasingly devotional.

Moorcroft Wilson said of the love poem: “I have no doubt that it’s about Glen Byam Shaw. It’s very much like the poems that Sassoon wrote to his first lover after the war, Gabriel Atkin, although the results of that relationship were very different. Glen was a very nice person, really kind and imaginative, and didn’t treat Sassoon like dirt and wasn’t unfaithful.”

The poem was a reminder of how difficult life was for him at a time when “homosexuality was very much forbidden”, she said. “Certainly for people he knew, it would be quite obvious that it wasn’t a woman he was talking about in the poem. The two men had been introduced a year earlier, but this was the first time they got together alone. This is written after the first really intimate evening together. Was this when they first made love?”

She added that Sassoon’s love poetry to men “tends to be non-specific”, that he pretends to have been writing to a woman in a poem such as “The Imperfect Lover”, but it was in fact inspired by Atkin because he had sent it to Atkin.

She observed that a line such as “you are with me in the voiceless air” was typical of Sassoon with its “rather nebulous, mysterious feeling”.

The relationship with Shaw ended amicably. They remained close friends, each eventually finding a wife, although Sassoon’s marriage broke down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julian Richards, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, rediscovered the poem, which had not been published in full.

Richards noted that their correspondence reflected affection and respect. He pointed to one of Shaw’s 1939 letters, written while waiting to be called up: “Shaw is very much saying I’m terrified, I only hope I will be brave like you were. Then later, one of the letters says, the brigadier of my regiment remembers you and speaks incredibly highly of you.”

Shaw, who made his London debut as an actor in 1925, became a leading director, working with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, among others, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Richards’s research has taken him to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, which holds Shaw’s directorial notebooks, among other material. He went to the Cambridge archive in search of Shaw’s letters.

The Sassoon poem “fell into my lap”, he said. “I wasn’t looking at Sassoon. I was looking at Shaw.”

Professor Carol Rutter, Richards’s PhD supervisor at Warwick, said: “More students need to go into archives and find out what they contain. What’s really exciting as a supervisor is to have a student who will follow their nose and then have that tremendously exciting moment when something falls in their lap. It is an instant communication with the past. But it’s also the beginning of the next question that you want to ask.”

Of the poem, she added: “I love its understatedness, its quietness, its gentleness. You’re gone, but somehow you’re still present is just very resonant.”

The untitled poem



Though you have left me, I’m not yet alone:

For what you were befriends the firelit room;

And what you said remains & is my own

To make a living gladness of my gloom

The firelight leaps & shows your empty chair

And all our harmonies of speech are stilled:

But you are with me in the voiceless air

My hands are empty, but my heart is filled.

Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon

• This article was amended on 13 June 2019 to note the previous part publication of the poem.