Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 90: IV

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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.

IV

The Import counts. All great art greatly deals

With themes not insignificant. The less

Gives lesser art, howe’er the form express

The sense of that the artist thinks or feels.

And wonderful it is how life reveals

The great theme near at hand, did we but press

Our lives less fiercely, and our souls possess,

When stirred, until the fitting word congeals.

Art should not fail among us. All have eyes

Which bring the star-sown heavens nightly home,

And there are ever winds about the world.

And no man but hath felt the mysteries

Of birth and wedlock and death’s solemn gloam,

Or seen the petals of a rose uncurled.

Hesepe, 19th June