Alun Lewis wrote 'All Day It Has Rained' while stationed with the Royal Engineers in Longmore, Hampshire while training with that unit. The year was 1941 and despite his pacifist sympathies, Lewis had enlisted to fight and was later posted to India. He is considered to be one of the last 'Romantic' poets and is often seen as a bridge between the pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats and those of the post-war period, such as Hughes and Gunn.

This being the 80th anniversary of D-Day, that extraordinary invasion of Nazi controlled Europe, I print Lewis's poem in full. We need to remember the nature of the wickedness that was fought against and not lose sight of what drove men like Lewis to join up despite their reservations. Incidentally, Edward Thomas, who appears in the penultimate line, was a poet whom Lewis much admired and who was killed in action in 1917 in the Great War. 

Lest We Forget.

     All Day It Has Rained

      All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
      Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
      Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
      And from the first grey wakening we have found
      No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
      And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
      And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
      All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
      Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
      Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
      Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
      Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
      And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
      Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
      Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
      And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
      And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
      And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
      As of ourselves or those whom we
      For years have loved, and will again
      Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
      Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

      And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
      Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
      Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
      Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
      By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
      To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
      On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.