Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 20: A RONDEL OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE

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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.

A RONDEL OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Big glory mellowing on the mellowing hills,

And in the little valleys, thatch and dreams,

Wrought by the manifold and vagrant wills

Of sun and ripening rain and wind; so gleams

My country, that great magic cup which spills

Into my mind a thousand thousand streams

Of glory mellowing on the mellowing hills

And in the little valleys, thatch and dreams.

O you dear heights of blue no ploughman tills,

O valleys where the curling mist upsteams

White over fields of trembling daffodils,

And you old dusty little water-mills,

Through all my life, for joy of you, sweet thrills

Shook me, and in my death at last there beams

Big glory mellowing on the mellowing hills

And in the little valleys, thatch and dreams.