Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 69: IX

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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.

IX

Here is thy limit, mightiest of thine age

An under- and an over-world to paint,

Peopled with epileptic and with saint,

The murderer’s, ogre’s, and the gambler’s rage:

Too much of fever in thee to assuage

Our average human restlessness, the taint

Of a charmed subtlety oft rendering faint

The sense of man’s salvation in thy page.

Perchance in thy heroic spirit, fraught

With too much tragedy, the causes lie;

That spirit unembittered, overwrought,

In which a something fitful we descry,

A fretfulness, as in thine image caught

By Sonia Kovalevsky’s soulful eye.

Hesepe, 28th May