The leather bound presentation volume contains three manuscript poems in fair copy by Edith Sitwell. They are: 'Lullaby', first published in Times Literary Supplement (16 March 1940) and then in E. Sitwell, Poems Old and New (1940); 'Dirge to the New Sunrise', first published in Orion IV (1947) and then in E. Sitwell, The Canticle of the Rose (1949); and 'The Canticle of the Rose', first published in Wake (1948) and then in The Canticle of the Rose .
Additional notes refer to the circumstances of the writing of the first two poems (after the bombing of Hiroshima) and to other literary allusions.