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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 47: VILLANELLE
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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.

VILLANELLE

So is thy music unto me,
As the bright moon which tides obey,
As the white moon upon the sea.
And like a wind that scatters free
The petals of an April day,
So is thy music unto me.
It falleth light and quietly
And sweet as summer’s petals—nay,
As the white moon upon the sea.
As moonlight falling silvery
On waves of wild and surging grey,
So is thy music unto me.
As o’er each white and ebon key
I watch thy silver fingers play,
As the white moon upon the sea,
On headlands of eternity
My soul is hurled, and dashed in spray!
So is thy music unto me
As the bright moon which tides obey,
As the white moon upon the sea.