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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 16: TO THE OLD YEAR
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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 THE OLD YEAR

Old year, farewell!
Much have you given which was ill to bear:
Much have taken which was dear, so dear:
Much have you spoken which was ill to hear;
Echoes of speech first uttered deep in hell.
Pass now like some grey harlot to the tomb!
Yet die in child-birth, and from out your womb
Leap the young year unsullied! He perchance
Shall bring to man his lost inheritance.