The lost poem Siegfried Sassoon gave to a schoolgirl
A PREVIOUSLY unknown poem by Siegfried Sassoon, in which he wrote that “love is the law of life”, has been discovered more than half a century after his death.
The great First World War poet gave it to a 16-year-old girl who had fallen ill after meeting him on a school trip.
Virginia Palmer (née Knowles-Jackson) was a pupil at the Convent of the Assumption in Sidmouth, Devon, when her class visited Sassoon’s home near Heytesbury, Wilts. The outing was organised by Mother Margaret Mary McFarlin, the headmistress and nun who became Sassoon’s spiritual mentor.
Mrs Palmer, now 69, recalled sitting by a crackling fire as he recited poetry: “It was a quintessentially English bythe-fireside scene, with the housekeeper bringing in tea … I just thought what a remarkable man he was.” A week later, after hearing that the girl was laid up with a heavy cold, he asked Mother Margaret to give her the poem.
Mrs Palmer told The Sunday Telegraph: “How special was that?”
She has treasured the poem, entitled Intellect & Intuition, and signed and dated Oct 4 1964, ever since. Ahead of the Armistice centenary on Nov 11, she wanted to share it, having recently learned that it was unpublished.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, author of the biography, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend, said: “It’s obviously genuine … I haven’t seen it in all my readings of all the manuscripts.”
Home front
Sassoon conveyed the horror of trench warfare. Twice wounded, he received the Military Cross for bravery, but wrote of hurling it into the River Mersey. He underwent psychiatric treatment and struggled to adjust to civilian life. In his later years, his poetry was increasingly devotional, and Moorcroft Wilson described this poem as “typical of that second half ” of his life.
She spoke of the impact of Mother Margaret on Sassoon, who converted to Catholicism in 1957 and christened her “the greatest benefactor of my life”.
“In the Fifties, he’d been very miserable. He’d separated from his wife, whom he couldn’t stand. He’d had an affair, and that didn’t go well. Then he started writing these sorts of poems of spiritual yearning,” she said.
The nun contacted him after reading Sequences, his 1956 collection, in which she sensed his spiritual struggle.
“She said, something tells me that you’re looking for God,” Moorcroft Wilson said. “He’d lost his faith in the First World War. She also – and this is where it bears on the poem – realised that he was not an intellectual, that he responded emotionally to things. The poem is very interesting because it’s pointing to that same idea, that it’s not the intellect, it’s the heart.”
Mrs Palmer contacted the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship to find out more about the poem. Meg Crane, its chairman, said: “It’s a poem nobody’s seen before except Mrs Palmer … There’s a certain amount of charm in … an elderly man reaching out to a young girl.”
Sassoon died in 1967, aged 80. Palmer, who now lives in Hambledon, Hants, recalled that, as a teenager, the poem “was beyond and above me”. As an adult, she understood it: “I thought, I get where he’s coming from … I felt more of his suffering.”