Alun Lewis "Goodbye" WW2 Poem set to music Animation Movie video

Heres a virtual movie of Welsh poet Alun Lewis (1915 - 1944) reading his bittersweet romantic poem about the tragedy of a soldiers parting from a lover through being called to war. Alun Lewis, (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and short story writer, died, aged twenty-eight, in Burma in the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others describe his poetry as the path from pre-war Yeats and Auden to post-war poets like Hughes and Gunn. In Wales there are those who think his greater versatility and finer intelligence place him above his contemporaries Dylan Thomas and R.S. Thomas. Born and brought up near Aberdare in South Wales, the son of teachers, Lewis read history at Aberystwyth and Manchester. Early in 1940, after a brief period teaching and despite his pacifist inclination, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers. In the following year he joined the South Wales Borderers and travelled to the war in India. Becoming a soldier had a stimulating effect on Lewis's writing: Raiders' Dawn, a collection of forty-seven poems, appeared in 1942 and early in 1943, The Last Inspection, a book of short stories, was published, both to considerable critical acclaim. In March 1944, Lewis died in an accident on active service in Burma. His second volume of poems, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, was published in 1945 and his Indian short stories, together with some letters, In The Green Tree (1948). This lovely unforgetable melancholic poem is surely a timeless universal dedication to all lovers who have been parted by the cruelties of war. Kind Regards Jim Clark All rights are reserved on this video sound recording copyright Jim Clark 2008 Goodbye........ So we must say Goodbye, my darling, And go, as lovers go, for ever; Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels And make an end of lying down together. I put a final shilling in the gas, And watch you slip your dress below your knees And lie so stlil I hear your rustling comb Modulate the autumn in the trees. And all the countless things I shall remember Lay mummy-cloths of silence round my head; I fill the carafe with a drink of water; You say 'We paid a guinea for this bed,' And then, 'We'll leave some gas, a little warmth For the next resident, and these dry flowers,' And turn your face away, afraid to speak The big word, that Eternity is ours. Your kisses close my eyes and yet you stare As though god struck a child with nameless fears; Perhaps the water glitters and discloses Time's chalice and its limpid useless tears. Everything we renounce except our selves; Selfishness is the last of all to go; Our sighs are exhalations of the earth, Our footprints leave a track across the snow. We made the universe to be our home, Our nostrils took the wind to be our breath, Our hearts are massive towers of delight, We stride across the seven seas of death. Yet when all's done you'll keep the emerald I placed upon your finger in the street; And I will keep the patches that you sewed On my old battledress tonight, my sweet.

Running time: 02:06

• alun
• douglas
• dylan
• edward
• goodbye
• keith
• lewis
• owen
• poem
• poet
• poetry
• sassoon
• thomas
• war
• welsh
• wilfred
• ww2