The Kiss is a short cycle of three songs on poems by Siegfried Sassoon. It was written in 1967 when I was still at Cambridge, and was performed several times by tenor Peter Birts and myself. It was also performed and broadcast in 1969 by Gerald English and Raynell Grissell.

It then lay in a drawer for 27 years, despised and rejected of men. In 1994  I took a fresh look at it and decided that, despite its indebtedness to Britten’s War Requiem, it has sufficient character of its own to make it worth revising. I made few changes, except to tidy up the notation and improve the timing – a highly technical process known as “de-squashing”.

The first poem, Suicide in the trenches, adopts the pastoral idiom of Housman to describe the effect of the trenches on a simple country boy and to set up the horror of the last line. The Kiss grimly explores the difficult ground of Sassoon’s mixed emotions in battle (he was a courageous and effective officer and took pleasure in some aspects of warfare).  The dug-out, in which the homosexual Sassoon tenderly watches an exhausted young man sleeping, ends with a sudden and impassioned outpouring of rage:

You are too young to fall asleep for ever,

And when you sleep

You remind me of the dead.

 Giles Swayne 2005

1 Suicide in the trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

2 The Kiss

To these I turn, in these I trust -
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this :
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

3 The Dug-out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face ? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold ;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder ;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head . . .
You are too young to fall asleep for ever ;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Siegfried Sassoon