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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 46: FORM (A Study)
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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.

FORM
(A Study)

Flower-like and shy,
You stand, sweet mortal, at the river’s brim:
With what unconscious grace
Your limbs to some strange law surrendering
Which lifts you clear of our humanity!
Now would I sacrifice
Your breathing, warmth, and all the strange romance
Of living, to a moment. Ere you break
The greater thing than you, I would my eyes
Were basilisk to turn you into stone.
So should you be the world’s inheritance.
And souls of unborn men should draw their breath
From mortal you, immortalised in Death.