Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 117: 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

So forward still, might but my strength avail

Out of the brooding darkness of my plight,

Each day to bring one glimmering shaft of light,

Each night to add some fragment to the tale,

That so I sleep. Else o’er my dreams prevail

These sorrows, or within me hour-long smite

The hammers of the brain, and turn the night

Into a thing to make man’s reason fail.

—A little further; for the thoughts still rise

Over me like a soughing wind, that blows

From where the surges boom along the graile

Of the world’s misery under lowering skies,

—A little further and my task I close,

Lest twilight overtake me and I stale.

Hesepe, 25th June