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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 19: SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
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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.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

No mortal comes to visit me to-day,
Only the gay and early-rising Sun
Who strolled in nonchalantly, just to say,
“Good morrow, and despair not, foolish one!”
But like the tune which comforted King Saul
Sounds in my brain that sunny madrigal.
Anon the playful Wind arises, swells
Into vague music, and departing, leaves
A sense of blue bare heights and tinkling bells,
Audible silences which sound achieves
Through music, mountain streams, and hinted heather,
And drowsy flocks drifting in golden weather.
Lastly, as to my bed I turn for rest.
Comes Lady Moon herself on silver feet
To sit with one white arm across my breast,
Talking of elves and haunts where they do meet.
No mortal comes to see me, yet I say
“Oh, I have had fine visitors to-day!”
Douai,
August 20th, 1916.