Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 66: 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

Tolstoy is great in art, in thought not great.

Yet his thought troubles, oft-times shivering through

With icy barb the best that thought can do.

And when we ponder o’er his latter state,

And note its argument, backed by the fate

That marked his greatness down, we feel here too

That Something elemental, vast and true

To which all things at length capitulate.

And ye who sadly ponder to behold

The ruin of such greatness, grieved to see

How the child in him acted, thought and spoke,

Perchance will wonder, when the tale is told,

Whether ’twas not a mightier Thing than he

On which the Titan stumbled when he broke.

Hesepe, 24th May