The life that I have

I loved this poem from the moment I first read it.

The life that I have is all that I have,

And the life that I have is yours.

The love that I have of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

 

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have,

Yet death will be but a pause,

For the peace of my years in the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

During the Second World War the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) used well-known poems to encrypt messages being transmitted to agents in occupied Europe. Having agreed on a poem to use, the sender picked words and assigned numbers to the letters. The numbers were then used to encrypt the message. A more comprehensive explanation can be found here.

  However, it was discovered to be insecure because cryptologists were able to identify famous poems from published works. The head of SOE, Leo Marks (1920-2001), recognised the problem and suggested using original poems. At Christmas 1943 he wrote the short poem above to the memory of his girl-friend, Ruth, who had just been killed in a plane crash in Canada. In 1944 the poem was issued to the British agent, Violette Szabo, who was killed at Ravensbrück, aged just 23.

The poem became famous after it was included in the 1958 film about Violette Szabo, ‘Carve Her Name with Pride’. The film claims, incorrectly, that the poem was written by Violette’s husband, Étienne, but Marks allowed the claim to stand on condition that he was not identified as the author.