Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,
Lined by the wind, burned by the sun;
Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth,
As whose children we are brethren; one.
Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
Was there grief once? grief yet is mine.
O loved, living, dying, heroic soldier,

All, all, my joy, my grief, my love are thine!

In the description of the actual fighting itself Mr Nichols is not so happy. Nothing, not even the greatness of the occasion can make poetry out of this staccato realism:

Deafness. Numbness. The loudening tornado.
Bullets. Mud. Stumbling and skating.

My voice's strangled shout:

It is pleasant to turn from this to his Sonnet on the Dead, where he again joins hands with Rupert Brooke and all the other poets of the war who have seen their friends die before their faces, times without number:

They have not gone from us. O no! they are

The inmost essence of each thing that is

Perfect for us; they flame in every star;

The trees are emerald with their presences.

They are not gone from us; they do not roam

The flow and turmoil of the lower deep,

But have now made the whole wide world their home, And in its loveliness themselves they steep.

They fail not ever; theirs is the diurn

Splendour of sunny hill and forest grave;
In every rainbow's glittering drop they burn;
They dazzle in the massed clouds' architecture;
They chant on every wind, and they return

In the long roll of any deep blue wave.

It must not be supposed, however, that Mr Nichols is a war-poet only. Long before the war, in Oxford days, he was already haunted by the spell of beauty, and had answered the call.

In his short introduction he quotes Mark Liddell on the nature of the poet, and of what English poetry consists, to defend his attitude, which is that the poet is after all only one of us : he speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are: "Given a little more sensitiveness to external stimuli, a little more power of associating ideas . . . a sense of rhythm somewhat keener than the average-given these things we should be poets too. . . ." He warns us that English poetry is not a rhythm of sound, but a rhythm of ideas: he who would think of it as a pleasing arrangement of vocal sounds has missed all chance of ever understanding its meaning. There awaits him only the barren generalities of a foreign prosody, tedious, pedantic, fruitless.

In other words, it is the firm ground of truth we have to search for in his work, not a magic manipulation of iambuses, spondees, dactyls, and tribrachs.

In spite of his warning, however, we find ourselves again and again delighted at the lilt and lovely melody of his songs:

Kingcups flare beside the stream,
That not glides now, but runs brawling ;

That wet roses are asteam

In the sun and will be falling,
Say the chestnut sheds his bloom;
Honey from straw hivings oozes ;
There's a nightjar in the coombe;
Venus nightly burns, and chooses
Most to blaze above my room;

That the laggard 'tis that loses.

His philosophy is akin to that of Wordsworth :

First must the spirit cast aside

This world's and next his own poor pride
And learn the universe to scan

More as a flower, less as a man.

Occasionally he almost captures an Elizabethan lightness and limpidity in his lyrics, as in

Our fast-flickering feet shall twinkle,
And our golden anklets tinkle,
While fair arms in aery sleeves

Shiver as the poplar's leaves.

Frequently he shows traces of a careful training in the school of Milton. We should be inclined to place that poet as far the most prominent among those who have influenced Mr Nichols. He has inherited a splendid vision and developed an intense emotional realisation of the meaning of beauty. In his war poems he has sounded depths that no other warpoet has touched. He can be realistic and grim when occasion calls for it: he understands the mind of the soldier completely, and brings a sympathetic humour to the study of the warrior temperament. But it is in his passion for natural scenery that we learn to love him best and see him most clearly:

So when my dying eyes have loved the trees
Till with huge tears turned blind,

When the vague ears for the last time have hearkened To the cool stir of the long evening breeze,

The blackbird's tireless call,

Having drunk deep of earth-scent strong and kind,
Come then, O Death, and let my day be darkened.
I shall have had my all.

K

V

DORA SIGERSON

RS CLEMENT SHORTER was killed by the war.

M

Summer with her pretty ways now is taking leave of me, Slow the ling'ring roses fall, softly sings the honey-bee, How can I go back again to the horrors of the town, Where the husky voice of war fiercely echoes up and down?

Other women have had to suffer, but most of them came through: Dora Sigerson not only did not come through, but she gave vent to piteous cries of anguish which rise through their pathos to heights of real poetry :

But, God! to dream, to wake, and dream again,
Where screams red war in harvesting dead men.
Ah! dream of home, of love, of joy, all thrilling,
To wake once more to killing, killing, killing.

She was obsessed by the horror of the whole thing: naturally fragile she could not withstand the avalanche of blood she had not the capacity that so many of us had of becoming more and more hardened by the holocaust first there came the inevitable breakdown and illness which she has interpreted for us in unforgettable verse in The Hours of Illness:

How slow creeps time! I hear the midnight chime,
And now late revellers prepare for sleep;

A last gay voice rings in a passing rhyme,
And past my door the anxious footsteps creep.