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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 53: PASSION
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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.

PASSION

All life from passion springs.
In holy ecstasy
’Midst whir of angel-wings,
Did God decree
The golden stars that shine:
The flaming morn,
And that this flesh of mine
Should once be born.
And all the works of men
That live indeed:
Joyance of sword or pen,
High thought or deed,
Are in such primal fashion
Contrived and wrought.
God grant me fire of thought
To work Thy will—with Passion!