Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 58: 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

So thus I picture it, not as life lies

Now writhing, but as when the days and nights

Followed each other in unmarked delights;

Nor noted we the measure of the prize

Till all was over. Now the spirit cries,

What time encroaching Inanition blights,

For but the phantom of its past, and fights

Extinction with its memories. Let them rise!

Let me dissemble that as in past days

The crystal fountain with delicious flow

Of bursting social joy unconscious plays

Over the garden close, where row by row

The flowers of life in such profusion blaze

That their own loveliness they do not know.

Hesepe, 20th May