Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 82: XXII

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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.

XXII

Who to the visions of immortal Thought,

Engendered by the music of the mind—

First in that place where our poor human kind

Sit in the cave and watch the shadows wrought

By firelight on the wall, obscurely caught;

Then luring on to where the soul, half blind,

Turns from the Splendour which itself divined—

With kinglier toil a loftier art hath brought,

Than Plato? Who more haunted by the light

Hath ever yet gone coasting with the sun,

Or in the deep and constellated night,

Claimed from the spheres their voices as they run?

Or soaring where the Eternal Glories shine

Hath stretched to earth a more majestic line?

Hesepe, 13th June