Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 89: III

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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.

III

Thus language is the type wherein revealed

Art’s universal function we behold,

In sensuous forms appropriate to unfold

Whate’er of meaning Individuals yield:

A doctrine this which doth enlarge the field

To every man who in himself doth hold

But speech enough a simple thought to mould

In words well wedded to the sense concealed.

—Doubtless a truth, though strained beyond the Norm,

If still the theme, with varying purport fraught,

Loses itself entirely in the Form,

And ugliness and beauty count for naught;

And yet a truth, although a truth in part,

All art expression, not all expression art.

Hesepe, 18th June