I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a memory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
in the marred shadow
Of your gift.

"To S.A." opens and dedicates T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a bitterly unhappy note. It was probably written around the same time as Seven Pillars, though fortunately it escaped the fate that befell Lawrence's manuscript. While the latter was misplaced in a train station and never resurfaced, a rough sketch of the former was scrawled on the flyleaf of a book on a flight to Cairo in 1919 and is still extant, in a library at Oxford:

I wrought for him freedom to lighten his sad eyes: but he had died waiting for me. So I threw my gift away and now not anywhere will I find rest and peace....

Insofar as content goes, "To S.A." touches on some of the same themes and the same images as Seven Pillars. The poem begins with an image of "tides of men"; similarly, later in his work Lawrence characterises the Arab force as being wave-like: after each attack, "the wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more." Loss -- of either a single dear friend, or a whole host of men -- despite one's best efforts, and the helplessness of mortality, is also touched on; but the poem is far more personal than Lawrence permits himself to be in the rest of Seven Pillars, much of which deals in abstractions.

And S.A.? A number of theories have been brought forward as to his or her identity, based largely on supposition. Lawrence's biographer, Robert Graves, claimed that the initials stood for "Son Altesse" -- a title which might be bestowed upon a man or woman of nobility during the Middle Ages -- and that the poem's subject was most probably Fareedeh el Akle, a particularly lovely young woman who had helped Lawrence learn Arabic before the war. The theory falls down, however, because Akle herself denies it:

I am not S.A. and this is the truth. T.E. never fell in love with any woman. He could not... T.E. wished that S.A. would be a mystery that is difficult to solve. S.A. is to me Syria-Arabia.

If the initials were intended to stand for Syria and Arabia, it would certainly be consistent with much of Lawrence's work. His writing overflows with his love for the East, represented as beautiful images of water and starlight over the desert. But being of English descent, Lawrence felt himself to be a foreigner, never quite able to become fully assimilated into Arabian culture, despite his best efforts. In Seven Pillars, this manifests itself in painful descriptions of inner conflict as Lawrence struggles to reconcile his two halves. If "To S.A." represents the East, it would seem that in the end, Lawrence's Western side won out.

Writer Desmond Stewart asserted that the poem was written to one Sharif Ali, Sheik of the Harthi tribe (acted by Omar Sharif in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia), borne of their shared experiences during the war. Another theory suggests that the flagellation that Lawrence received at the hands of the Turkish Bey, described in Seven Pillars, actually came from Ali; as Lawrence had a propensity toward sadomasochism, this postulation does much to support the idea that Sharif Ali was S.A.

Lawrence himself was enigmatic on this point. He started off by saying that S.A. was an idea, not a person. Later he claimed that S.A. was "an imaginary person of neutral sex"; he finally settled on the notion that "S" stood for a village in Syria, and "A" for a person whose identity he never chose to reveal.

That said, the general consensus lies in that S.A. was Selim Ahmed, nicknamed Dahoum ("the little dark one"), Lawrence's close friend and quite possibly his lover. Dahoum worked as a waterboy on the border between Syria and Turkey; Lawrence met him in 1911 and took him in under his wing, teaching him maths and English in return for Arabian language lessons and the pleasure of his company.

Lawrence returned to his home in Oxford for a time in 1913, and brought Dahoum with him. His colleagues were scandalised at their relationship, and rumours about his sexuality abounded; regardless of the truth or lack thereof behind the stories that circulated, Lawrence's contemporaries and biographers are in agreement that the times he spent with Dahoum were the happiest of his life.

Returning to Arabia, Lawrence left Dahoum in charge of an archaeological site at Carchemish in 1914. They never saw each other again; famine swept through the area in 1916 and Dahoum perished in the typhus outbreak that followed it. Word of his death reached Lawrence in 1918 in the midst of a campaign in northern Syria.

This last is the most compelling argument for S.A.'s identity as Dahoum, best presented by Lawrence himself in the epilogue from Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus.

Sources:
Lawrence of Arabia: Dahoum. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/lawrenceofarabia/players/dahoum.html (23 September 2004)
Yagitani Ryoko. An S.A. Mystery. http://homepage3.nifty.com/yagitani/tpc_en12.htm (23 September 2004)
T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. London: Penguin Books, 2000.