WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 5: AUTUMN IN PRISON
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

AUTUMN IN PRISON

Here where no tree changes,
Here in a prison of pine,
I think how Autumn ranges
The country that is mine.
There—rust upon the chill breeze—
The woodland leaf now whirls;
There sway the yellowing birches
Like dainty dancing girls.
Oh, how the leaves are dancing
With Death at Lassington!
And Death is now enhancing
Beauty I walked upon.
The roads with leaves are littered,
Yellow, brown, and red.
The homes where robins twittered
Lie ruin; but instead
Gaunt arms of stretching giants
Stand in the azure air,
Cutting the sky in pattern
So common, yet so fair.
The heart is kindled by it,
And lifted as with wine,
In Lassington and Highnam—
The woodlands that were mine.