Guess the Author

 So, who wrote this? 

'O that we might, for one brief hour,
Forget that we are bound apart,
And lie within each other's arms,
Mouth pressed on mouth, and heart on heart.
For just one hour, from all our life,
To sink unchained through passion's deep
And, cast upon the farther shore,
To lie entwined in tender sleep!'

It has a nineteenth-century sound, this lament of a yearning lover separated by social convention ('bound apart') from the object of his/her love. But it was written well into the twentieth century, by the same hand as this, modelled on the popular Victorian song, 'After the Ball'  –

After the Bomb

After the Bomb had fallen,
After the last sad cry,
When the Earth was a burnt-out cinder
Drifting across the sky,

Came Lucifer, Son of the Morning,
With his fallen-angel band,
Silent and swift as a vulture
On a mountain-top to stand.

And he looked, as he stood on the mountain
With his scarlet wings unfurled,
At the charnel-house of London
And the cities of the world.

And he laughed..........

And as that mocking laughter
Across the heavens ran,
He cried 'Look!' to the fallen angels –
'This is the work of Man
Who was made in the image of God!'

Both this apocalyptic protest poem and the love lyric above were in fact written by one of the unlikeliest poets of the 20th century – Mary Wilson, Baroness Wilson of Rievaulx (born on this day in 1916), who survived 55 years of marriage to the pipe-smoking, Gannex-wearing prime minister Harold Wilson, and lived on to the ripe old age of 102, which made her the longest-lived of all PMs' spouses, and the only centenarian. The Wilsons' was not a straightforward marriage, and Mary might well have sought consolation – or at least yearned for it – without its bounds. Who could blame her? 
  Her Selected Poems (1970) was the fastest-selling book in Britain on its release, and ended up selling an astonishing 75,000 copies. In 1976 she was one of the three judges for the Booker Prize, flanked by Walter Allen and Francis King. The winner was Saville by David Storey.