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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 4: LONELINESS
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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.

LONELINESS

Oh where’s the use to write?
What can I tell you, dear?
Just that I want you so
Who are not near.
Just that I miss the lamp whose blessèd light
Was God’s own moon to shine upon my night,
And newly mourn each new day’s lost delight:
Just—oh, it will not ease my pain—
That I am lonely
Until I see you once again,
You—you only.