by Leo Marks, during their recent nuptuals. I enjoy poetry but have never read this poem before, and think it’s worth sharing: 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.
ABOUT LEO MARKS:
Leo Marks, the son of a Jewish bookseller, was born in London on September 24, 1920. He was first introduced to cryptography when his father showed him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Gold-Bug
. From this early interest, he demonstrated his skill at codebreaking at an early age by deciphering his father's secret price codes that he wrote inside the covers of books. Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio. These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer
. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo
(whose story is tragic and admirable) when she was sent to France during the war. Leo Marks died on January 15, 2001 in new York City.
