Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 15: X

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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.

X

There is a stillness in the heart of sound,

How dire soever, if unloosed too long.

There is a time for pause in every song,

And in the whirling cyclone’s heady round

A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound

With iron girdle, and with leathern thong

To the acute wheel of the sense’s wrong

Only until the creaking spring is wound.

Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,

Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,

And visions of fair spaces left behind,

As if the genius of the place had wings,

And in the migratory hour were sent

To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.

Rastatt, 30th April