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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 31: TO THE UNKNOWN NURSE
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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 THE UNKNOWN NURSE

Moth-like at night you flit or fly
To where the other patients lie;
I hear, as you brush by my door
The flutter of your wings, no more.
Shall I now call you in and see
The phantom vanish instantly?
Perhaps some sixteen stone or worse,
Suddenly falling through my verse!
Nay, be you sour, or be you sweet,
I’d see you not. Life’s wisdom is
To keep one’s dreams. Oh never quiz
The lovely lady in the street!
I knew a man who went large-eyed
And happy, till he bought pince-nez
And saw things as they were. He died
—A pessimist—the other day.