Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 131: XIII

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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.

XIII

England is England’s history, that great dome

Which ever us and our immortal dead

Draws shadow, while men’s common lives are led,

Strange thought! in that superb half-light, half-gloam.

And all who dwell in England, all who roam

The seas on great emprise inherited,

Gazing into that fulness overhead,

Behold a sanctuary and a home.

England’s a spirit that doth interfuse

Whate’er is of her, every form wherein

Herself she reincarnates, all that strews

Her bosom and her years, and works within,

And spreads, and wells, and sinks, and overflows;

And how to know her only Spirit knows.

Hesepe, 12th July