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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 9: THE HATEFUL ROAD
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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.

THE HATEFUL ROAD

Oh pleasant things there be
Without this prison yard:
Fields green, and many a tree
With shadow on the sward,
And drifting clouds that pass
Sailing above the grass.
All lovely things that be
Beyond this strong abode
Send comfort back to me;
Yea, everything I see
Except the hateful road;
The road that runs so free
With many a dip and rise,
That waves and beckons me
And mocks and calls at me
And will not let me be
Even when I close my eyes.