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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 25: THE SLEEPERS
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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.

THE SLEEPERS

A battered roof where stars went tripping
With silver feet,
A broken roof whence rain came dripping,
Yet rest was sweet.
A dug-out where the rats ran squeaking
Under the ground,
And out in front the poor dead reeking!
Yet sleep was sound.
No longer house or dug-out keeping,
Within a cell
Of brown and bloody earth they’re sleeping;
Oh they sleep well.
Thrice blessed sleep, the balm of sorrow!
Thrice blessed eyes
Sealed up till on some doomsday morrow
The sun arise!