So we lay down the pen,
So we forbear the building of the rime,
And bid our hearts be steel for times and a time
Till ends the strife, and then,
When the New Age is verily begun,
God grant that we may do the things undone.

— Geoffrey Bache Smith

Meaning

The speaker tells us, in plain terms, that the work of writing must stop for now. “We lay down the pen” repeats like a steady drumbeat, and that repetition matters: it turns a private choice into a shared pledge. Poetry—“the building of the rime”—is pictured as craft, something raised carefully like a house. But the speaker sets that craft aside and calls for harder stuff: “bid our hearts be steel.” That’s the central move of the poem. Feeling gives way to firmness, not because art is worthless, but because the times demand endurance. The phrase “for times and a time” hints at an unknown stretch, a season measured not by schedules but by trial. And the goal isn’t to quit forever. The pause is purposeful and temporary: “Till ends the strife.” The poem keeps its eyes on a horizon where struggle has run its course and a “New Age” begins. Only then does the speaker ask for a blessing—“God grant”—to finish what life’s breakage left incomplete, “the things undone.” So the surface message is simple: stop the poem, harden the heart, survive the present, and hope to return to the work that gives life meaning. Underneath, it’s a statement about duty, a sober kind of hope, and the fear that interruptions can become losses if we don’t make it back. The poem holds all three at once.

Literary Interpretation

Formally, the poem is compact and deliberate, leaning on repetition and plain diction. “So we lay down the pen” opens with anaphora that feels ceremonial, like an oath being spoken aloud. Craft metaphors—“building of the rime”—make poetry feel like labor you can touch, while “hearts be steel” shifts into the language of metal and tempering, suggesting the moral forging that crisis requires. “Times and a time” carries a biblical echo and stretches time beyond the calendar, which deepens the sense of waiting. The rhyme is loose but audible: “pen/then,” “rime/time,” and the firm closure of “begun/undone.” That last pair matters: it locks the poem with a hinge between what will start and what must be finished. The tone is restrained and prayerful; “God grant” turns the final couplet into petition rather than boast. In this light, the poem reads as a wartime or crisis lyric in miniature, a vow to suspend art in order to serve necessity, while refusing to surrender art’s claim on the future. The speaker doesn’t glorify hardness; they ask for it as a tool to get through, so that tenderness—the work of making—can return. The poem’s power is in that honest order of priorities.