A very personal response to the suicide of his close friend Francesca Allinson just as the Second World War was ending. His grief and remorse found expression in recently published work of young poets who, unlike those of the First World War, had been unable to make a poetry out of the brutalities of war: their best poetry was made out of love. ‘I thought of the song-cycle as having a subtitle: “Love under the shadow of Death”.’ (Michael Tippett)