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

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 26: COMRADES O’ MINE (Rondeau)
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.

COMRADES O’ MINE
(Rondeau)

Comrades o’ mine, that were to me
More than my grief and gaiety,
More than my laughter or my pain:
Comrades, we shall not walk again
The road whereon we went so free—
The old way of Humanity.
But you are sleeping peacefully
Till the last dawn, heroic slain,
Comrades o’ mine.
Till the last moon shall fade and flee
You sleep. Oh sleep not dreamlessly,
You whereof only dreams remain,
Come you by dreams into my brain,
Inspire my visions, and still be
Comrades o’ mine!