De-coding Chelsea Clinton's wedding poem

Forbes has dispatched a literary sleuth to decode the Leo Marks's poem read at Chelsea Clinton's wedding over the weekend. Known as "The life that I have," the poem comes from Marks's memoir of his time as a WWII intelligence agent, Between Silk and Cyanide. Marks used poetry as a kind of code to transmit messages between Allied camps in Occupied Europe, trusting in odd rhyme schemes and memorable turns of phrase to communicate under the radar:

The poem read at the wedding, however, wasn't written for intelligence purposes but in memory of Marks' girlfriend, Ruth, who died in a plane crash in Canada in 1943. Marks received the news from her father on Christmas Eve and wrote the poem, addressed to Ruth, that evening. "I transmitted," he writes in Between Silk and Cyanide, " a message to her which I'd failed to deliver when I'd had the chance."

Whether out of habit or because of the nature of the post mortem transmission, the code-poem rules were used for "The life that I have." That made it possible for Marks to pass along the poem a few months later to Violette Szabo, a half-French, half-cockney agent about to return to France. Marks never told her that he was the author of the poem. A few months later she was captured by the Germans and was later executed at the Ravensbrück concentration camp . . .

Read more at Forbes.