Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 40: VI

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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.

VI

As the lone searcher, crouching o’er his glass,

Beside the window while the light is high,

Doth moved therein the forms of things descry

Invisible else to common vision crass;

Spirilla, the amœba’s sprawling mass,

With gliding infusoria sailing by—

And marks each vestige with entranced eye,

Glimmer, emerge and clear, dissolve and pass;

So in that optic lens, where never yet

The sun prevailed, beneath my prison wall,

One-windowed to the past, but brightly lit

By the eye’s own pure light, a swarm of small

And fleeting memories, else forgotten, flit,

Trivial, yet entrancing to recall.

Rastatt, 9th May