Ardours and Endurances

At the deadest hour of night, the eastern sky suddenly blazes—but it is not the sun. It is the beloved’s hair, bright enough to haunt the speaker through life, dreams, and even death.

Robert Nichols’s early twentieth-century poems move from private longing and the ache of the past toward the battlefields of the First World War. A speaker who must leave a cherished place hears Honour calling him forward; soon he is riding with the guns, facing the heat of the trenches and the rain-darkened voices of the dead. Yet amid exhaustion and danger, he finds flashes of comradeship, beauty, and a love that returns like fire. In “A Faun’s Holiday” and the poems that follow, what forms can ardour take—and what can endure when the guns begin?

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