The lectures proved to be Richardson’s pretext to remove Cernuda away from war. The alleged tour was reduced to some talks with Spanish language students at Cambridge and Oxford. In London, with no money and no future, the poet got in touch with Rafael Martínez Nadal and Gregorio Prieto, who offered him financial support and a lasting friendship. Richardson, meanwhile, got him a job teaching a group of Basque refugee children in England.

In September 1938, after a failed attempt to return to Spain, Cernuda became teacher of Spanish at Cranleigh School, a boarding school in Surrey. There he spent most of his free time reading English poets and writing new poems, stories and essays. Life at the school suited him. However, in January 1939, Cernuda took up a teaching assistant job in the department of Spanish at the University of Glasgow.
He stayed there until 1943. During those years he wrote the poems “Las nubes”, the poems in prose “Ocnos”, almost finished “Como quien espera el alba”, and completed several critical essays. His poems blended his reflexions about his new surroundings with memories of war and his destroyed homeland.

In the summer of 1943, Cernuda left Glasgow, a city that he had come to loathe; he accepted Professor John B. Trend’s invitation for the job as lector at Cambridge University and settled there. Cernuda lived there at Emmanuel College, in front of a quiet and intimate garden that inspired the poem “El árbol.” In April 1944, he finished “Como quien espera el alba” and fell in love again, an experience that led him to write “Cuatro poemas a una sombra” that began his next book, Vivir sin estar viviendo.

In June 1945, he moved to London to work for the Instituto de España, an institution aimed at presenting to the English public a more liberal vision of Spanish culture than the one coming from Franco’s Spain. He lived at painter Gregorio Prieto’s flat, 59 Hyde Park Gate, across from one of the most beautiful parks in the city. He began translating Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, with Edward M. Wilson, a professor at King's College, University of London, as his advisor. Prof. Wilson, in turn, translated some of Cernuda’s poems and sent them to the most celebrated English poet of the time, T. S. Eliot. Eliot showed no special interest, an attitude that Cernuda took as a humiliating rejection.

In the spring of 1947, Concha de Albornoz wrote Cernuda from the New England region of the United States, to offer him a teaching position at Mount Holyoke, the women's college where she taught. He found the invitation appealing, and in September, Cernuda left Southampton bound for the United States.