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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 27: TO R. E. K. (In Memoriam)
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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.

TO R. E. K.
(In Memoriam)

Dear, rash, warm-hearted friend,
So careless of the end,
So worldly-foolish, so divinely-wise,
Who, caring not one jot
For place, gave all you’d got
To help your lesser fellow-men to rise.
Swift-footed, fleeter yet
Of heart. Swift to forget
The petty spite that life or men could show you;
Your last long race is won,
But beyond the sound of gun
You laugh and help men onward—if I know you.
Oh still you laugh, and walk,
And sing and frankly talk
(To angels) of the matters that amused you
In this bitter-sweet of life,
And we who keep its strife,
Take comfort in the thought how God has used you.