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.
By Leo Marks
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.
By Leo Marks
I first learned of Leo Marks when Chelsea Clinton and her husband chose this poem as part of their wedding ceremony. It contains lovely sentiments, which can be interpreted in different ways; it touches a deep chord. My interpretation is that “my life and my love are for those I love, forever.”
It’s a lovely poem for a wedding, but the strange thing is that it is also a nice poem for a funeral. A wedding and a funeral. The beginning of a new life and the end of life. It seems odd. But once I learned a little more about Leo Marks, maybe it’s not so odd after all.
Leo Marks was a cryptologist, someone who creates and breaks secret codes. He was the son of an antiquarian bookseller in London, according to my favorite source for this kind of information, Wikipedia. He was first introduced to cryptography when his father gave him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Gold Bug." This is one of Poe’s most bizarre short stories, as I remember it, but I can see why a budding young cryptologist would find it fascinating. Young Marks demonstrated his skill at code breaking by deciphering his father's secret price codes. What a shock that must have been! It was the beginning of a long and brilliant career.
His father, Benjamin Marks, was joint owner of the Marks & Co bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, which achieved international fame with the 1970 book of that title by New York writer Helene Hanff and the later plays and movie. I loved the movie. A wonderful story, literary and enchanting, of unrequited love.
As a teenager, Leo Marks earned pocket money by setting the notoriously difficult London Times cryptic crossword. He became a cryptographer during WWII, a story he tells in his autobiography, "Between Silk and Cyanide," a behind-the-scenes look at the agents and policymakers of Winston Churchill’s secret service agencies. I’ve put the book on my ever-growing reading list.
According to reviews of the autobiography, Marks had no trouble breaking codes, but he could not break through the red tape and competition among different intelligence agencies, the Services Research Bureau or SOE among them, to get them to adopt a new system of codes that he thought would save lives. Marks said he was not a soldier or an agent, but just someone trying to keep them alive. He was considered brilliant at his work and sent many agents into enemy lines in occupied Europe armed with secret codes and life-saving techniques. His book is about his valiant but unsuccessful struggle for a new system of codes (“silk codes”).
It’s a lovely poem for a wedding, but the strange thing is that it is also a nice poem for a funeral. A wedding and a funeral. The beginning of a new life and the end of life. It seems odd. But once I learned a little more about Leo Marks, maybe it’s not so odd after all.
Leo Marks was a cryptologist, someone who creates and breaks secret codes. He was the son of an antiquarian bookseller in London, according to my favorite source for this kind of information, Wikipedia. He was first introduced to cryptography when his father gave him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Gold Bug." This is one of Poe’s most bizarre short stories, as I remember it, but I can see why a budding young cryptologist would find it fascinating. Young Marks demonstrated his skill at code breaking by deciphering his father's secret price codes. What a shock that must have been! It was the beginning of a long and brilliant career.
His father, Benjamin Marks, was joint owner of the Marks & Co bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, which achieved international fame with the 1970 book of that title by New York writer Helene Hanff and the later plays and movie. I loved the movie. A wonderful story, literary and enchanting, of unrequited love.
As a teenager, Leo Marks earned pocket money by setting the notoriously difficult London Times cryptic crossword. He became a cryptographer during WWII, a story he tells in his autobiography, "Between Silk and Cyanide," a behind-the-scenes look at the agents and policymakers of Winston Churchill’s secret service agencies. I’ve put the book on my ever-growing reading list.
According to reviews of the autobiography, Marks had no trouble breaking codes, but he could not break through the red tape and competition among different intelligence agencies, the Services Research Bureau or SOE among them, to get them to adopt a new system of codes that he thought would save lives. Marks said he was not a soldier or an agent, but just someone trying to keep them alive. He was considered brilliant at his work and sent many agents into enemy lines in occupied Europe armed with secret codes and life-saving techniques. His book is about his valiant but unsuccessful struggle for a new system of codes (“silk codes”).
But the old system prevailed, and interestingly it was based on encoding poems, classical and contemporary, Marks own poems among them. What a fascinating subject this turned out to be. So Leo Marks wrote poems encoded with secret messages and secret knowledge that he hoped would save the lives of soldiers and secret agents working against Hitler.
Well, then, what does Leo Marks’ poem, “The Life that I have,” mean? What secrets are encoded in it? Intriguing! But we’ll probably never know.
Well, then, what does Leo Marks’ poem, “The Life that I have,” mean? What secrets are encoded in it? Intriguing! But we’ll probably never know.
It's amazing what you find out when you are exploring something of interest and branch out from there into new and unknown territory in the world of knowledge. It’s like what Mary Oliver said about living your life in “Wild Geese:’
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Life calls to you “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” I think Leo Marks would have liked this particular poem. And maybe could have used it to encode messages that would save lives.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Life calls to you “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” I think Leo Marks would have liked this particular poem. And maybe could have used it to encode messages that would save lives.
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