Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 6: WHAT WE THINK OF

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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.

WHAT WE THINK OF

Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo,

We think of things that we have done, and things we mean to do:

Of girls we left behind us, of letters that are due,

Of boating on the river beneath a sky of blue,

Of hills we climbed together—not always for the view.

Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo,

We see the phantom faces of you, and you, and you,

Faces of those we loved or loathed—oh every one we knew!

And deeds we wrought in carelessness for happiness or rue,

And dreams we broke in folly, and seek to build anew,—

Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo.