1. Mersa
2. Cairo Jag
3. Fragment from Bête Noire
4. To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena
5. On a Return from Egypt

Keith Douglas was one of the most talented British poets of the twentieth century, and an astute chronicler of the Second World War. He was killed in Normandy three days after D-Day. For the heart is a coal, growing colder—the title coming from Douglas’s last poem—is a setting of five of his poems, lasting 18 minutes and written for contralto and piano or chamber orchestra. It was developed in collaboration with Jess Dandy.

Some of Douglas’s best known poems directly reflect his experiences on the battlefield, but the poems selected for this piece are more focused on the spaces around it—of waiting, of attempting to find pleasure, love, and hope in its wake, and of the increasing burdens of guilt, trauma, and grief.

The poems are set in chronological order. The first two were written on Douglas’s first campaign, in Egypt: “Mersa” is named after a town on the coast which had been the site of a battle months before Douglas’s arrival; “Cairo Jag” documents life in the capital, which had become home to military and diplomatic personnel from numerous Allied countries—living in a parallel reality to the locals.

The last three were written in England before his posting to Normandy. Douglas was working on a more expansive project titled “Bête Noire,” which was unfinished; the fragment included in this piece describes some of Douglas’s struggle with that beast, which he called “so amorphous and powerful. . . no use sacrificing to him, he takes what he wants.”

“To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena” and “On a Return from Egypt” were Douglas’s last completed poems: the former is addressed to four women Douglas had been entangled with; the latter is an elegy to lost friends, and to Douglas himself, who had—accurately—predicted his own demise.

The full poems are reproduced in the front matter of the scores, available above.

The cover image is Takrouna: Two miles West of Enfidaville by Alex J. Ingram (1943), depicting the Desert War, in which Douglas fought.