I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down:
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.
John Lucas comments: ‘The poem was written in March 1942, at a time when Keyes was being conscripted into the army. Though he gropes for words and instead of a quill finds an arrow in his hand – and the self-mockery here is evident – he also knows his eyes are ‘barbed’: in other words, he has taken on the aggressions of the fighting man. And while the poem may seem to close on a note of self-pity, it does after all state a truth. The image of cultural wreckage in time of war is apt enough. By the time Keyes wrote the poem the medieval city of Coventry had been burnt and flattened by German bombs. [Second World War Poetry in English, Greenwich Exchange, 2013, 37-8]