* This poem was first published under a different title, ‘To Lenin’, in an anthology of New English Poems, edited by Lascelles Abercrombie, in 1930. By the following year it had become ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ and the title of a collection of McDiarmid’s own verse. In another poem in that same volume, ‘The Seamless Garment’, addressed to a mill worker in McDiarmid’s native Langholm, he describes Lenin as ‘The best weaver Earth ever saw’.