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  • Rastatt: III
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Rastatt: III

Archibald Allan Bowman

Within these cages day by day we pace
The bitter shortness of the meted span;
And this and that way variously we plan
Our poor excursions over the poor place,
Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace.
For neither bars nor tented wire can ban
Full many a roving glance that dares to scan
The roomy hill, and wanders into space.
Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed
And unimpaired the free impetuous quest
Of the mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed
To the full measure of a life possessed
Awhile, but never counted, now revealed
Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.

Rastatt, 7th May


Archibald Allan Bowman

from Sonnets From a Prison Camp (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1919)

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English prisoners World War I
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Archibald Allan Bowman1883 - 1936

A. A. Bowman was a philosopher, Professor at Princeton and Glasgow Universities, an advocate of the League of Nations, and author of a series of poems written during incarceration as a prisoner of War in 1918.
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