Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

('Consider this silent disciplined assembly
Close squadded in the dockyard's hooded lamps, Each blur a man with some obscure trouble
Or hard regret as bulky as the cargo
The cranking derricks drop into the hold.
Think of them as the derrick sways and poises Vacantly as their minds do at this passage, Good-natured agents of a groping purpose
That sends them now to strange precipitous place
ON EMBARKATION
'Alun Lewis's poems . . . express the poetry of seriousness, the poetry of life and death, in the forms in which he lived through it, the forms of modem war, exile and separation.'
The Listener)