Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 30: V

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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.

V

There is a garden where the whispering breeze

Perchance has wooed the lilacs in the spring,

Where still perchance at dawn a few birds sing,

And love goes nesting in the willow-trees.

But night’s ear now caught other sounds than these,

And darkness, bending, shrouded with his wing

What from an iceberg scalding tears might wring,

The glowing core of any furnace freeze.

Thick as the crimsoned leaves of autumn fall,

And crimsoned, too, and torn, and crushed as they

(’Twas the wet hand that told it) over all,

Moaning and writhing in their pain they lay;

And none to turn their faces to the wall,

And none to close their eyes, and none to pray.

Rastatt, 4th May