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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 10: ENGLISH FLOWERS IN A FOREIGN GARDEN
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About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

ENGLISH FLOWERS IN A FOREIGN GARDEN

Snapdragon, sunflower, sweet-pea,
Flowers which fill the heart of me
With so sweet and bitter fancy:
Glowing rose and pensive pansy,
You that pierce me with a blade
Beat from molten memory,
With what art, how tenderly,
You heal the wounds that you have made!
Thrushes, finches, birds that beat
Magical and thrilling sweet
Little far-off fairy gongs:
Blackbird with your mellow songs,
Valiant robin, thieving sparrows,
Though you wound me as with arrows,
Still with you among these flowers
Surely I find my sweetest hours.