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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 14: TO KATHLEEN, AT CHRISTMAS (An Acrostic)
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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 KATHLEEN, AT CHRISTMAS
(An Acrostic)

  K ings of the East did bring their gold
  A nd jewels unto the cattle fold.
  T he angel’s song was heard by men
“H oly! holy! holy!” then.
  L ittle and weak in the manger He lay
  E ven as you in a cradle to-day;
  E ven as you did the Christ-child rest
  N estling warm in His mother’s breast.
Gütersloh,
December 1916.