Vera Brittain wrote “Roundel” while she served as a nurse in WWI, tending to young soldiers whose lives were slipping away faster than she could save them. The poem’s circular structure mirrors the emotional loop she lived inside- grief returning, memory returning, the same faces arriving wounded and departing in silence. As a nurse, Brittain stood at the threshold between life and death, and”Roundel” becomes a quiet act of witness; a way to honor those she cared for, and to name the sorrow that followed her long after the war ended. In its brief, repeating lines, the poem captures the ache of devotion to a world unraveling, reminding us that caregiving in wartime is both service and sacrifice.
Roundel
(“Died of Wounds”)
Because you died, I shall not rest again,
But wander ever through the lone world wide,
Seeking the shadow of a dream grown vain
Because you died.
I shall spend brief and idle hours beside
The many lesser loves that still remain,
But find in none my triumph and my pride;
And Disillusion’s slow corroding stain
Will creep upon each quest but newly tried,
For every striving now shall nothing gain
Because you died.
France,
February 1918.
This poem is in the public domain.
Vera Brittain (1893-1970) was a British writer, pacifist, and World War I nurse whose work became a defining voice of witness during the Great War. She left Oxford in 1915 to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, caring for wounded soldiers in England, Malta, and France. The loss of her fiancé, brother, and close friends shaped her powerful memoir “Testament of Youth” and her later poetry, including her roundel form. Brittain spent the rest of her life writing, lecturing, and advocating for peace, leaving a legacy of courage, compassion, and remembrance.