Lost Siegfried Sassoon Love Poem, Found!

University of Warwick PhD student Julian Richards found a love poem written by Siegfried Sassoon to actor and director Glen Byam Shaw in Shaw's archives held by the Cambridge University library. The Guardian's Dalya Alberge notes that it's "a poem of only eight lines, but those lines are filled with tender emotion for a young man who was the author’s lover." From there: 

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 previously unknown love poem is by Siegfried Sassoon, one of the greatest war poets, and is being published for the first time today in the Observer.

Half a century after Sassoon’s death, the untitled poem was discovered 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. Now the leading Sassoon expert has confirmed that it is unpublished.

Learn more at The Guardian.