Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 84: XXIV

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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.

XXIV

Thus do the greatest ever by sheer might

Of natural penetration find their way

Into the Innermost, where Being’s ray

Burns unendurable, and in that light

Their own with nature’s majesty unite

To one high rhythm, stupendous interplay

Of Thought and Being, perioded, gray

With shadow, with serenest sunshine bright.

So that old man of Koenigsberg profound,

By night revolving two infinities,

And so Spinoza, when his spirit found

Intellect into Intuition rise,

Envisaging creation from above,

Where knowledge takes the perfect form of Love.⁠[1]

Hesepe, 14th June

[1] The “Amor Dei intellectualis.”