I cannot remember the first encounter, but Sidney’s looks and manner are ever present. His was a grave countenance for one so young. He had fine hazel eyes, a longish nose and pointed ears. His mouth, although he liked to laugh, exuded sadness, and his sallow skin was echoed by the camel hair coat in which he seemed to shelter even when spring was round the corner. He would come up the stairs to my studio swinging his walking stick (was it an heirloom? – an unusual accessory at that time) and, shuddering, would exclaim ‘I’m all shrivelled up with cold.’ He was, I think, essentially alone, but curiously keen to be sociable; he loved parties, at which he might be found immersed in leafing through the host’s books or, indeed, writing.
MILEIN COSMAN: ‘Memoir’, in Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems (2002)
Keyes’s mother died of peritonitis a few weeks after he was born, and his father, an army officer, entrusted his son’s education to his grandfather, to whom several of the poems are dedicated. Sidney was frail and sickly and spent most of the time away from other children, in the company of his nurse. He did not go to school until he was nine. When his grandfather married for the third time, the new Mrs Keyes sent Sidney to Dartford Grammar School, from where he passed his Common Entrance to Tonbridge School, as his father had done. There he continued his isolated life, withdrew into himself and was encouraged in his efforts to write poetry by his form master, Tom Staveley, himself a poet. In October 1940 he won a history scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he met John Heath-Stubbs, who opened his eyes to the importance of poetic technique. At Oxford he formed his own dramatic society, edited The Cherwell and was awarded a First in the first half of the wartime history schools. The Iron Laurel, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1942, the year in which he joined the army. The Cruel Solstice was published in 1943. He was captured in the last days of the Tunisian campaign and died ‘from unknown causes’ on 29 April 1943. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize posthumously in 1944. Minos of Crete, a play he had written at Tonbridge, appeared along with other plays and short stories in 1948, edited by Michael Meyer. His Collected Poems, edited with a ‘Memoir’ by Meyer, were published in 1945.
O never trust the heart’s assurance –
Trust only the heart’s fear:
And what I’m saying is, Go back, my lovely –
Though you will never hear.
O never trust your pride of movement –
Trust only pride’s distress:
The only holy limbs are the broken fingers
Still raised to praise and bless.
For the careless heart is bound with chains
And terribly cast down:
The beast of pride is hunted out
And baited through the town.
Young men walking the open streets
Of death’s republic, remember your lovers.
When you foresaw with vision prescient
The planet pain rising across your sky
We fused your sight in our soft burning beauty:
We laid you down in meadows drunk with cowslips
And led you in the ways of our bright city.
Young men who wander death’s vague meadows,
Remember your lovers who gave you more than flowers.
[When truth came prying like a surgeon’s knife
Among the delicate movements of your brain
We called your spirit from its narrow den
And kissed your courage back to meet the blade –
Our anaesthetic beauty saved you then.
Young men whose sickness death has cured at last,
Remember your lovers and covet their disease.]
When you woke grave-chilled at midnight
To pace the pavement of your bitter dream
We brought you back to bed and brought you home
From the dark antechamber of desire
Into our lust as warm as candle-flame.
Young men who lie in the carven beds of death,
Remember your lovers who gave you more than dreams.
From the sun sheltering your careless head
Or from the painted devil your quick eye,
We led you out of terror tenderly
And fooled you into peace with our soft words
And gave you all we had and let you die.
Young men drunk with death’s unquenchable wisdom,
Remember your lovers who gave you more than love.