I.M. Jo Cox,'best and bravest'

... Yes, you'd like an army of Sidney Cartons,
The best world made conveniently by wasters, second rates,
Someone we could conveniently spare,
And not the way it has to be made,
By the loss of our best and bravest every where.
All this is not more than we can deal with.

Extract from Margot Heinemann's 1937 elegy for John Cornford:

Grieve in a New Way for New Losses

And after the first sense "He will not come again"
Fearing still the images of corruption,
To think he lies out there and changes
In the process of the earth from what I knew,
Decays and even there in the grave, shut close
In the dark, away from me, speechless and cold,
Is in no way left the same that I have known.
All this is not more than we can deal with.

The horror of the nightmare is that it evades
Your steady look, steals past the corner of the eye,
Lurks in the sides of pictures. Death
Is fearful for the fifth part of a second,
A fear that shakes the heart: and that fear lost
As soon, yet leaves a sickness and a chill,
Heavy hands and the weight of another day
All this is not more than we can deal with.

If we have said we'd face the dungeon dark
And gallows grim, and have not meant to face
The thin time, meals alone, in every eye
The comfortless kindness of a stranger- then
We have expected a privileged treatment,
And were out of luck. Death has many ways
To get at us: in every loving heart
In which a comrade dies he strikes his dart
All this is not more than we can deal with.

In our long nights the honest tormentor speaks
And in our casual conversations:
"He was so live and young - need he have died
Who had the wisest head, who worked so hard,
Led by his own sheer strength: whom I so loved?"
Yes, you'd like an army of Sidney Cartons,
The best world made conveniently by wasters, second rates,
Someone we could conveniently spare,
And not the way it has to be made,
By the loss of our best and bravest every where.
All this is not more than we can deal with.