Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 3: PROEM

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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.

PROEM

He who hath never from behind toothed wire

Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude,

Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood

The embers of another day expire

In glory welling westward, like the pyre

Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood

Bears dwindling into that infinitude

That great souls end in; then around the fire

Of his own musings, lodering through the bars

Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn

His lost felicity—can ne’er divine

The vastness of the common things that line

Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim

Infinity with galaxies of stars.

Rastatt, 26th April 1918