A prisoner of war has almost nothing, but E. H. Johnson's "P.O.W." shows that he still owns his memories, and that those memories can be both a refuge and a torment. The speaker closes his eyes and the cell dissolves into rolling fields and the scent of sage. Then, in the last words of the first stanza, the illusion breaks: "for I'm locked in a cage." The poem lives in that tension between the country behind the eyelids and the walls waiting when they open.
The title does the work of context, since we are told nothing else about who the speaker is or where he is held. Nothing in the poem names a war, a country, or a date, and it would be a mistake to invent them. What the text does tell us is how the speaker feels, and it tells us through the senses. Johnson builds the lost homeland from sight, smell, sound, and motion: the "white flags of deer" bounding away, the "whir of startled grouse," the smoke climbing "straight and tall, / In a silvery pillar above an old farmhouse." The images feel rural and specific rather than generic. The "white flags" are an especially interesting choice. The flash of a deer's tail is simply what a deer looks like when it runs, but in a poem about a prisoner of war the phrase can't help but carry the echo of surrender. The speaker sees his freedom in the very symbol of his captivity.
The smoke is worth lingering on too. It rises "straight and tall," a calm, undisturbed line, the opposite of the speaker's disordered feelings. It stands for domestic peace, a hearth with someone inside it, and it prepares the turn in the third stanza, where the poem admits that the landscape is only half of what he longs for. "I miss these things, but miss you most of all." The fields and the farmhouse are scenery; the real ache is for a person.
Structurally, the poem is quite controlled. It is written in three four-line stanzas, with a rhyme scheme that is not a perfect repeating pattern. "Fields" rhymes with "yields," and "sage" with "cage," while the second stanza rhymes "fall" with "tall." In the third stanza the word "fall" returns once more, now rhyming with "all." That repetition is deliberate and meaningful, not lazy. The word "fall" appears in "year's fall," "all," and "this year's fall," and it shifts its sense each time, from a season of haunting memory to a season of expectation. The rhythm settles into long, steady lines that lean toward the ten-syllable beat of traditional English verse, which gives the poem a measured, almost dignified tone. A man in despair might be expected to write in fragments; this speaker writes in order, as though discipline were one more way of resisting the cage.
The most striking movement is the poem's emotional reversal. Stanza one ends in "hot tears." Stanza two is nostalgic and aching. But the final stanza turns: "Yet it is with joy I look to this year's fall." The little word "Yet" carries the whole shift. Autumn, the season that had been tormenting him with memories, becomes a season to get through, because on the far side of winter lies "Spring -- and you!" The dash and exclamation mark are the only moment where the poem's composure breaks, and it breaks into happiness rather than grief. The seasons form the poem's clock: autumn is where he is, snow is the obstacle, and spring is the promise. Hope is expressed as a calendar.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat imprisonment as the end of the speaker's inner life. It does not describe the cage in detail; it mentions it only once, in the final word of the first stanza, and then moves past it. That restraint is the point. The cage gets one line, while the fields, the farmhouse, and the beloved get everything else. Johnson suggests that what a captive keeps is exactly what matters most, and that the imagination, trained on the right memories, can turn waiting into a kind of faith.