Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 121: III

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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.

III

Man lives by love. The state subsists by Law.

And in these sacred islands east and west,

Constant of late the Beast its scaly breast

Half rears from earth, and with its unclean paw

And bloody fang a-work, and dripping jaw,

Offers at England. It is time this pest

Were exorcised, and Unrest laid to rest,

With all that dares to hold thee not in awe.

So thou deal’st faithfully with God and man;

With man, who prays thee, England, but to place

Thy heavy hand on all that doth immerse

The god-like in him, and distort his plan;

With God, who made thee regent for a space

Over a portion of His Universe.

Hesepe, 1st July