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Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 104: IV
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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.

IV

There is one source alone which can supply
New life and impulse. ’Tis a voice that rolls
Half inarticulate in English souls,
From field and mine and factory, where they ply
The single talent Fate did not deny,
Their labour. Now they hear upon the shoals
Of a sad life that there are other goals
To man’s existence than they yet descry;
And, scarcely yet discerned, they deeply feel
A presence over them, a haunting sense
Of music in the world, whose echoes steal
Unto them from the spheres, where in the immense
Circle of night and day the planets keep
Measure and watch, while mortals toil and weep.

Hesepe, 15th June