Sunday 22nd August 1943

A quiet day. They don't bother us much on Sundays. I'm sitting in the almost windless drawing dept. and have just finished another poem, the forth this month. It is “The Riders” (6x8 and 1x4 line verses). Quite regular in form; I've even started each line with the conventional capital! This is the story of “the lady Romance and her knight,” mentioned in my last entry.

The prose paragraph which gave me the original (since greatly modified) idea was:

“The lady and her knight rode clad in gold and white and as they rode a light went before them, drying up the grey rain and burning the melancholy pine trees into a pure defiance against the darkling sky...”

That odd paragraph in a modern novel, stated the train of thought, but the only words I have used from it are the first six!