A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 9: PIPER’S WOOD

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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.

PIPER’S WOOD

In Minsterworth when March is in,

And Spring begins to gild the days,

Oh! then starts up a joyous din,

For Piper’s Wood is full of praise,

Because the birds deem winter gone

And welcome the returning sun.

Blackbird and thrush and robin dear

Within that wood try over all

The songs they mean to shout so clear

Before green leaves grow red and fall;

And harkening in its shadows you

Must needs sing out of Summer too.