Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 10: V

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About This Book

A sequence of sonnets composed by a soldier in enemy captivity during the First World War, recording frontline violence, the suddenness of bombardment, marches and captures, the strain of waiting and the loss of comrades, and the solace found in memory and poetic labour. Many poems juxtapose immediate scenes—exploding shrapnel, crowded billets, marches, and internment camps—with reveries of homeland landscapes and classical or moral reflections. Sections move between field incidents, the nadir of imprisonment, thoughts of home and influences, and short epigrams or maxims, showing how verse acted as a mental bulwark against despair while exploring themes of fate, endurance, and the persistence of inner freedom.

V

The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. ’Tis there

We concentrate. There hung in the void street

A local silence, which our sudden feet

With lesser clangour startled in its lair,

While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air

Could break the boding hush of that retreat.

So in a thunder-storm the quickened beat

Of one’s own startled pulses may impair

The silence of a room which the onfall

Of shafted noise o’erhead left deadly still.

Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan

The figured sounds which figured space do fill,

Far or more near. ’Tis sure the hodding van

Broke forward into silence virginal.

Rastatt, 29th April