Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 99: XIII

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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.

XIII

Protector of the spirit, who by night

With hands bent round it lanthorn-like dost frame

Against the wind a shelter for its flame,

Thyself a thing of spirit and a light,

The Commonwealth! Yet in thy sovereign right

Thou may’st not unrebuked, unchallenged claim

To be the First and Last, a holier Name

Than thine intoning from a higher height.

For blood is on thy hand and on thy head,

And war’s black cloud upon thy deep dark brow;

And in thy shadow Socrates lies dead.

And though awhile it needs must be that thou

For man’s unrighteousness shalt legislate,

Man’s righteousness will yet become thy Fate.

Hesepe, 17th July