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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 8: SONNET (To One Killed in Action)
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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.

SONNET
(To One Killed in Action)

My undevout yet ardent sacrifice
Did God refuse, knowing how carelessly
And with what curious sensuality
The coloured flames did flicker and arise.
Half boy, half decadent, always my eyes
Sparkle to danger: Oh it was joy to me
To sit with Death gambling desperately
The borrowed Coin of Life. But you, more wise,
Went forth for nothing but to do God’s will:
Went gravely out—well knowing what you did
And hating it—with feet that did not falter
To place your gift upon the highest altar.
Therefore to you this last and finest thrill
Is given—even Death itself, to me forbid.