1. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ was enclosed in a letter to Princess Caetani on 28 May 1951, the postscript of which reads: ‘I have just finished the short poem I enclose […] The only person I can’t show the little enclosed poem to is, of course, my father, who doesn’t know he’s dying.’ The poem was published in Botteghe Oscure in November 1951. The strict villanelle form of the poem (only two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first verse repeated throughout as a refrain) helps to keep in check the poet’s anguish at his father’s dying.
1. The Heart’s Assurance sets five poems by Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes, both of whom fell in the Second World War. Tippett’s cycle is not just a memorial to these poets and their soldier contemporaries – the songs were also inspired by the death of Tippett’s closest woman friend, Francesca Allinson, who committed suicide just as the war was ending. It was only five years later, when ‘the personal wound began to heal and, more importantly, as the very real wounds of the war healed’, that the composer was able to distance himself from these sad events to write this wonderful reflection on ‘Love under the shadow of death’. ‘This theme’, he wrote, ‘was dominant in the poetry produced under the stress of the last war, as contrasted with the bitterness expressed by Siegfried Sassoon, and the pity expressed by Wilfred Owen, in the 1914–18 war. I tried to express in the setting of these poems their dominant quality, the threat which death gave to love, for that is the collective emotion which these young poets seem to be expressing through their individual songs.’
1. See also Alun Lewis above, note 1, p. 901.
1. The poem was written in an Oxford examination room, after Keyes had finished his paper. He later disapproved of its ‘lush sentimentality’ and excluded it from The Iron Laurel (1942).
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 88