ThisCloud.net

Leo Marks, the World War II-era British cryptologist, is getting renewed attention this weekend, thanks to Chelsea Clinton. She used his touching poem, “The Life That I Have,” in her wedding Saturday to Marc Mezvinsky.

Marks, a bookworm, became fascinated by cryptography while hanging around his father’s Marks & Co. bookshop and learning about Edgar Allen Poe, who dabbled in the science and used it in “The Gold-Bug.” During the war, he helped spies use poetry to encode messages, a fascinating practice. But the poem that Chelsea read was not originally designed as a war-time tool — it was written in memory of a girlfriend who died in a plane crash. “I transmitted a message to her which I’d failed to deliver when I’d had the chance,” he wrote, according to Forbes. The poem also was used in the 1958 spy movie “Carve Her Name with Pride.”

To read more about Marks, you can pick up his memoir, “Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945.”