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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 49: A PHILOSOPHY
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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.

A PHILOSOPHY

Only in pages of men’s books I find
Swart villain and fair knight
Closing in fight.
Not piebald is mankind.
The soul is hued to such swift varying
As flying hornet’s sunshine-smitten wing.
Therefore, dear brother men (where’er ye be),
Who strive for right
With such short sight,
’Tis wise for little folk like you and me
Neither too much to praise nor yet to blame,
Since in our different ways we’re all the same.