Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
You can read the rest of the poem and hear Anthony Hecht introducing and reading it on the Poetry Foundation website
This is one of Hecht’s most famous poems and, some argue, the finest poem in English to address the Holocaust.
The poem opens with the burning of a Christian heretic in the Tower of London, but swiftly moves to “outside a German wood,” recounting a horrific event of the Holocaust in an attempt to capture how “barbarism dehumanizes its victims,” according to poet Ed Hirsch. Also described as a depiction of the “end of Humanism,” Hecht’s poem is one of his most frequently anthologized and discussed. [Poetry Foundation]