John Freeman, an English poet and critic of the early twentieth century, wrote “The Enemies” in the shadow of the First World War, at a moment when Georgian nature poetry was turning away from cheerful pastoral scenes toward more private anxieties. Freeman was often grouped with the Georgians for his plain diction and attention to landscape, but here the landscape does not comfort. It watches, pursues, and then disappears, leaving something worse behind. The poem turns a simple encounter with wind on a mountainside into a miniature psychological horror story.
At the centre is not just bad weather but the human need to find a face and a purpose behind disturbance. The speaker calls the wind “an evil sprite / Vexed with any man’s delight,” as if the storm were personally annoyed by human happiness. That is the core insight: fear makes the natural world seem deliberately hostile. Yet the greater shock comes after the wind stops. The final stanza shifts from noise to “silence,” and the question “Who could but fear what evil sprite / Crept through the tunnels of the night?” shows that the imagined enemy has multiplied. It no longer shouts; it creeps. The title’s plural “enemies” therefore makes sense: the wind is one enemy, but the silence and the unseen creature moving through it are others.
Freeman’s construction reinforces that movement from open attack to hidden dread. Each four-line stanza begins with two brief, almost blunt statements—“The angry wind / That cursed at me”—and then expands into a longer rhyming couplet: “Was nothing but an evil sprite / Vexed with any man’s delight.” The first pair hangs unrhymed, so the final rhyme feels like a door closing. The same pattern appears in the second stanza, where “steep” and “asleep” pair the dangerous mountain with a sleeping world, suggesting that no one is awake to witness or help. In the final stanza, “sprite” returns to rhyme with “night,” tying the poem’s imagined creature to darkness. The rhythm is not mechanically regular; short lines give way to longer ones, as if the speaker’s thoughts are moving from startled recognition to frightened elaboration.
Imagery of voice and movement dominates. The wind “cursed” and “shout[s],” but its most disturbing act is to cease. Freeman uses the phrase “tunnels of the night” to turn darkness into a series of passageways through which an evil sprite can creep. The word “tunnels” suggests hidden routes beneath or inside the world, places the speaker cannot see. The mountain steep gives the sprite a point of origin, while the sleeping world becomes a victim unaware. Even the adjective “dark” attached to “wind” does more than describe weather; it gives the wind intention and moral weight. By the end, the speaker is not relieved by calm. He is trapped in a new, quieter kind of listening.
What makes “The Enemies” significant is its compression. In twelve lines, Freeman captures how the mind converts natural force into supernatural story, and how silence can be more frightening than noise because it leaves the imagination free to invent. The poem belongs to a moment when poets were learning that the old consolations of nature—its beauty, its order, its peace—could no longer be taken for granted. Instead of offering escape, nature becomes a mirror for human dread. The wind may have been nothing but air, but the fear it leaves behind is real, and the real enemy is the one the speaker carries into the dark.