Peter Viereck's "To Be Sung" begins like a nursery rhyme and ends in a death camp. That journey, taken in five short stanzas, is the whole poem. A father addresses his daughter, and what starts as tender praise slowly becomes a vow: wherever she suffers, he will be there, even in the worst place imaginable.
The opening feels almost playful. The speaker spins a delicate hypothetical: if one petal could stand to other blossoms as blossoms stand to leaves, that is how the daughter stands to "all other daughters." It is the kind of hyperbole every parent recognises. But look at the question that closes the first stanza: "For what am I here for / If not to make love-songs / Of all the world's beauty?" The speaker defines himself by his function as a singer, and the song is not decoration but purpose. The second stanza keeps the pattern, now with a perfume "too delicate-lonely / To ever be breathed," and shifts the song's job from adoring to rescuing. Songs become "lassoes," woven "for the lonely / To tug them to love." Praise is turning into pursuit.
The third and fourth stanzas deepen this. The breeze that "dishevels / One curl of a ringlet" is the smallest imaginable hurt, yet the father promises, "I'll know and be with you." Notice the phrase "the prose of the world," which sets song against ordinary, flat, wounding reality. The music's "grace-notes" are "lead till they heal" — heavy with the weight of the daughter's pain until they actually soothe it. Then the weather turns. "When storms replace breezes, / No hurt can have healing," and the poem admits that love's limit is not rescue but companionship in dying: it can "pillow your fading." The repeated gesture of a pillow, soft and domestic, is one of the poem's quiet unifying images.
Then comes the final stanza, where the poem's tone breaks. "When the Camp says: 'Dig graves now, / We're coming to shoot you.'" The capital C and the bare word "Camp" need no explanation for a modern reader; the poem does not name a specific place or event, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the shift in register, from petals and ringlets to shovels and sand. The father's promise is now brutally concrete. He will help dig, buying "more seconds / To look up from digging, / To look at the sun." The pillow image returns in its darkest form: "I'll... pillow the sand out," smoothing the ditch the way one smooths a bed. The line "(I'll know and be with you)" repeats from the third stanza, now in parentheses, as if whispered, and its meaning has changed from comforting to unbearable.
The construction supports this slow descent. The lines are short, mostly built on a light, bouncing rhythm, with the sing-song quality the title promises. Rhyme is largely absent or loose, so the poem feels like a chant rather than a polished lyric, and the real structure comes from repetition. Each stanza closes with a rhetorical question beginning "For what am I here for" or "For what is a song for," and these refrains act like a song's chorus. The last one is the most telling: the speaker changes from "song" to "love" ("For what is love here for"), as though, at the edge of the grave, art has given way to something simpler and more naked.
What makes the poem significant is this tension between form and subject. Viereck keeps the gentle cadence of a lullaby even as the content turns catastrophic, and the mismatch is the point. The poem asks whether tenderness has any power against atrocity, and its answer is modest but unshakeable: love cannot stop the shooting, but it can give a person a few more seconds of sunlight and the knowledge that she is "never alone." The final phrase, "Whose dying we share," also quietly widens the lens. The daughter is one among "all the world's daughters," and the father's love, like the song of the first stanza, reaches outward to every one of them.