A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 19: SONG OF HEALTH

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About This Book

This collection gathers poems composed by a soldier at the Front that alternate between affectionate dialect songs celebrating Gloucestershire landscapes, traditions and pastimes and sober battlefield reflections on comradeship, sacrifice, and homesickness. Short formal pieces—ballades, trios, sonnets—and prose poems shift between light conviviality and stark moral questioning, often anchoring wartime anxiety in images of orchards, rivers and village life. Recurring themes include longing for home, the weight of witnessing death, gratitude, defiance, and the effort to reconcile pastoral memory with the experience of combat, producing verses that balance local humor and song with solemn meditation.

SONG OF HEALTH

For friends to stand beside, for foes to fight,

For devil’s work to break, for Wrong and Right,

And will (however hard) to choose between them:

For merry tales, no matter where you glean them:

Songs, stars, delight of birds, and summer roses,

Sunshine, wherein my friend the dog now dozes:

Danger—the zest of life, and Love, the lord

Of Life and Death: for every open word

Spoken in blame or praise by friend o’ mine

To spur me on: for old, good memories,

Keeping in my soul’s cellar like good wine:

For Truth that’s strong, and Beauty so divine:

For animals, and children, and for trees,

Both wintry-black and blossoming in white:

For homely gardens and for humming bees:

For drink, and dreams, and daisies on the sod,

Plain food, and fire (when it will light)—

Thank God!