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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 12: TO YOU—UNSUNG (Sonnet)
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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.

TO YOU—UNSUNG
(Sonnet)

How should I sing you?—you who dwell unseen
Within the darkest chamber of my heart.
What picturesque and inward-turning art
Could shadow forth the image of my queen,
Sweet, world aloof, ineffably serene
Like holy dawn, yet so entirely part
Of what am I, as well a man might start
To paint his breathing, or his red blood’s sheen.
Nay, seek yourself, who are their truest breath,
In these my songs made for delight of men.
Oh, where they fail, ’tis I that am in blame,
But, where the words loom larger than my pen,
Be sure they ring glad echoes of your name,
And Love that triumphs over Life and Death.