WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 22: SONNET
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

SONNET

Christ God, Who died for us, now turn Thy face!
Behold not what men do, lest once again
Thou should’st be crucified, and die of pain.
Look not, O Lord, but only of Thy grace
Do Thou let fall on this accursed place,
Where the poor starve and labour in disdain
Of blinded Greed and all its vulgar train,
A single thread of heaven that we may trace
Some way to Right! And since “great men” stand by,
Heedless of women and men that hunger, Lord,
Give Thou to common men the vision splendid.
Take (and if need be break) them, like a sword;
Take them, and break them till their lives be ended;
Here are a thousand christs ready to die!