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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 38: 4. SETH BEMOANS THE OLDEST INHABITANT
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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.

4. SETH BEMOANS THE OLDEST INHABITANT

We heard as we wer passing by the forge:
“’Er’s dead,” said he.
“’Tis Providence’s doing,” so said George.
“He’s allus doing summat,” so I said,
“You see this pig; we kept un aal the year
Fatting un up and priding in un, see,
And spent a yup o’ money—food so dear!
I wish ’twer ’e;
I’d liefer our fat pig had died than she.”