A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 28: GONNEHEM

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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.

GONNEHEM

Of Gonnehem it shall be said

That we arrived there late and worn

With marching, and were given a bed

Of lovely straw. And then at morn

On rising from deep sleep saw dangle—

Shining in the sun to spangle,

The all-blue heaven—branch loads of red

Bright cherries which we bought to eat,

Dew-wet, dawn-cool, and sunny-sweet.

There was a tiny court-yard too,

Wherein one shady walnut grew.

Unruffled peace the farm encloses—

I wonder if beneath that tree,

The meditating hens still be.

Are the white walls now gay with roses?

Does the small fountain yet run free?

I wonder if that dog still dozes....

Some day we must go back to see.