A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 27: LAND OF HEART’S DELIGHT

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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.

LAND OF HEART’S DELIGHT

Glory’s a temple open wide,

Content, a little shrine.

But Heart’s Delight is a land so bright

We reckon it half divine.

It lies wherever man has lived,

But wheresoe’er you find it

Its skies are blue with dreams come true,

And Heaven is just behind it.

Glory’s the universal gleam

Of all God gives to men.

Content, the little silver dream

He sends to one in ten.

But Heart’s Delight, all golden bright,

Is given to him alone

Who has hidden his heart in the deepest part

Of a place called Home.