Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 6: I

Open in WeRead

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.

I

Two hours before the mist of morning paled

Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,

And spectral day stole on the world with shame,

Into the night unsentinelled there sailed

The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed

Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim

Window and tile down clattering from the frame

Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,

And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept

From corridors by fitful candle; then

Gathered scared children down the winding stair,

And only whispers passed where no one slept.

And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when

The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.

Rastatt, 27th April