Ardours and Endurances; Also, A Faun's Holiday & Poems and Phantasies — Text and Context

Movement and Stillness in the War Poems

Later, in “Out of Trenches: The Barn, Twilight,” the soldiers rest in a barn, and the poem dwells on the quality of twilight light. The physical exhaustion of the troops is mirrored in the language: verbs slow, sentences lengthen. Nichols uses the barn as a transitional space—neither trench nor home—where time seems to pool. This technique of pausing within movement recurs throughout the sequence, creating a rhythm of effort and collapse.

Recurring Images: Sleep, Dust, and Music

Three images thread through both halves of the book. Sleep appears in the war poems as a state of exhaustion or death: “The earth sleeps. Sleeps the newly-buried clay.” In A Faun's Holiday, sleep becomes a pastoral luxury: “The trees are asleep, beautiful, slumbrous trees!” The same word carries opposite weights.

Dust appears in the war section as the substance of the dead: “The dust cries to the unregarding dust.” In the fantasy, dust is merely the dry ground of noon. Music—a yokel's pipe, twin reeds, a refrain—bridges the two worlds. In the war poem “The Summons,” a call is heard; in the faun's world, the pipe plays “the oldest burthen of the earth.” Nichols uses these recurring motifs to suggest that the same elements of experience persist across radically different settings, though their emotional valence shifts.

The Abrupt Turn to Fantasy

After the final war poem, “Deliverance,” the book pivots without warning to A Faun's Holiday, a long pastoral sequence. The shift is jarring. The war section ends with a sense of release; the fantasy begins with a faun drowsing in a sunlit glade. Nichols does not explain the transition. The effect is disorienting, as if the reader has stumbled from one world into another.

The fantasy section is structured as a series of vignettes: the faun's observations, a satyrs' feast, a hymn to Pan. The language becomes lush and sensuous, full of “golden jorums” and “nectarous liquor.” Yet the same attention to sensory detail—light on leaves, the sound of water—that marked the war poems reappears. The pastoral is not an escape but a parallel realm, governed by the same perceptual habits. The reader is left to decide whether the fantasy is a respite or a delusion.

The Third Book: Fragments and Experiments

The final section, Poems and Phantasies, collects shorter works that further fracture the book's unity. It includes a triptych (“The Hill,” “The Tower,” “The Tree”), songs from a play, fragments from Orestes, and a series of “Black Songs” set in English landscapes. The range is wide: from classical myth to Dorsetshire fields, from dramatic monologue to lyric.

The “Black Songs” are particularly striking. They return to the war's emotional territory but through the lens of English countryside. “At Braydon” and “Midday on the Edge of the Downs” use the same noon stillness that appeared in the war poems, but now the stillness feels haunted. The fragments from Orestes introduce a note of guilt and pursuit. The book ends with “Last Words,” a poem that feels final without offering resolution. The overall effect is of a poet testing forms, unable to settle on a single mode of expression.

Readers coming to this collection should be prepared for abrupt transitions and a refusal to reconcile the war experience with the pastoral. Nichols does not argue for a connection; he simply places the two worlds side by side. The book rewards attention to repeated words and images, which act as threads across the divide. It is best read not as a unified statement but as a document of a mind moving between extremes, trying to find a language for both the unspeakable and the idyllic.

I keep thinking about how those trench poems find their way back to fauns and quiet glades, as if sleep itself carried you between worlds. It reminded me of an older voice, The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 1 (of 5) Lyrics and old world idylls — Background and Themes, where twilight feels just as heavy and tender. Some books simply know that ache.