Steve Crook

It started life as a poem, by Alice Duer Miller. It's more like a novel in verse.

[From Wikipedia]
In 1940, she wrote the verse novel The White Cliffs. The story is of an American girl who coming to London as a tourist, meets and marries a young upper-class Englishman in the period just before the First World War. The War begins and he goes to the front. He is killed just before the end of the War, leaving her with a young son. Her son is the heir to the family estate. Despite the pull of her own country and the impoverished condition of the estate, she decides to stay and live the traditional life of a member of the English upper class. The story concludes as The Second World War commences and she worries that her son, like his father, will be killed fighting for the country he loves. The poem ends with the lines:
...I am American bred
I have seen much to hate here - much to forgive,
But in a world in which England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.

The poem was spectacularly successful on both sides of the Atlantic, selling eventually approaching a million copies - an unheard of number for a book of verse. It was broadcast and the story was made into a film. Like her earlier suffrage poems, it had a significant effect on American public opinion and it was one of the influences leading the United States to enter the War. Sir Walter Layton, who held positions in the Ministries of Supply and Munitions during the Second World War, even brought it to the attention of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Steve

TimR

Thanks Steve: it is evident that the poem is much better than the film. And bravo to the lady - anything that helped destroy isolationism is worthy of my attention and deserves praise. I had never heard of her, or the poem.


And as for this:

...am American bred
I have seen much to hate here - much to forgive,
But in a world in which England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live

Well, sir - she speaks for me. I could not have said it better myself....

Steve Crook

It's worth digging a copy out of the library. The poem (verse novel) is very long and is cloyingly over-sentimental in many parts. But it's an interesting read.

She died in 1942 so she never saw what they did with her poem in the film

Steve