Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 95: 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

As when along a level land we pace,

The scene, from where our forward-moving feet

Touch ground, to where the earth and heaven greet,

Seems to revolve in some vast wheel’s embrace,

Whose spoke-wise turning slow the eye can trace

From near-by hedges, wayside trees, that fleet

With rick and steading by, till all lines meet

And motion dwindles in far distant space—

There haply some majestic mountain mass

By contrast travels with us as we go,

And doth across the spirit, as we pass,

The feeling of its omnipresence throw—

So o’er man’s fleeting and particular fate

For ever omnipresent broods the State.

Hesepe, 30th June