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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 55: AN ADVENTURE WITH GOD
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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.

AN ADVENTURE WITH GOD

Far worse than pain,
Unutterable weariness
Of blood and brain—
Intolerable dreariness
Of days God gave me.
And I bethought
The first fresh flood of youth that rose to leave me,
And how in those brave days—
Virgin of lust and spot—
I had forgot
To render any praise.
Then, as I thus looked upward through the net
Wherein both soul and flesh lay cunningly caught,
God (’twas like Springtime calling from the earth
The flowers to birth!)
Smiled down and did restore
All that I had before.