Edward Shanks

Edward Shanks Poems

There is a beach upon a western shore
Which those who know it call the Beach of Shells,
For there the secret tides conspire to pour
...

This is the sea. In these uneven walls
A wave lies prisoned. Far and far away
Outward to ocean, as the slow tide falls,
Her sisters through the capes that hold the bay
...

The pale road winds faintly upward into the dark skies,
And beside it on the rough grass that the wind invisibly stirs,
Sheltered by sharp-speared gorse and the berried junipers,
...

Edward Shanks Biography

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks (11 June 1892 – 4 May 1953) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, then as an academic and journalist, and literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction. He was born in London, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He passed his B.A. in History in 1913. He was editor of Granta from 1912–13. He served in World War I with the British Army in France, but was invalided out in 1915, and did administrative work until war's end. He was later a literary reviewer, working for the London Mercury (1919–22) and for a short while a lecturer at the University of Liverpool (1926). He was the chief leader-writer for the Evening Standard from 1928 to 1935. The People of the Ruins (1920) was a science-fiction novel in which a man wakes after being put into suspended animation in 1924, to discover a devastated Britain 150 years in the future. The People of the Ruins has an anti-communist subtext (the future 1924 is devastated by Marxist revolutionaries).)

The Best Poem Of Edward Shanks

The Beach Of Shells

There is a beach upon a western shore
Which those who know it call the Beach of Shells,
For there the secret tides conspire to pour

Yearly a haryest raised in the deep-sea swells,
The empty houses of bright water-things,
In heaps of whorls and cones and fluted bells.

These hither a certain drift of current brings,
And on a bayed shelf in the rock bestows
Year after year their softly shining rings

Of lavender and pearl, umber and rose,
Of iridescent sheen, dim-shaded dun,
Of red that smoulders and of red that glows,

To lie there glistening beneath the sun,
Beside the shouting or the singing sea,
All beautiful, and empty every one.

Who knows how long ocean's fertility
Hath borne this harvest or how many tides
Have swept it to this blank tranquillity

From where Ijve water washes the rock's sides
On which these generations lived and grew
And where even now their enduring race abides?

For still, unseen beneath the covering blue,
Their children make new houses, ring on ring,
That'hither shall be swept in season due,

And each a senseless, empty, lovely thing.
But where these nations of the sea are laid,
The passer-by who pauses, wondering

At how and when the Beach of Shells was made,
Finds but few perfect, as when on their rock
Each by its maker was inhabited.

The tide that threw them here with careless shock
Has cracked the delicate walls, and passing feet
Spread ruin every day with kick and knock,

And winter's frosts have worked, and summer's heat,
To lay the intricate, vacant chambers bare,
Where once the creature lived and found life sweet.

Would you know more than this, then kneel down there
And dig a little with exploring hand,
Finding more fragments still in every layer.

Till last you find the shells all ground to sand.

Edward Shanks Comments

Christopher Tye 17 March 2017

Edward Shanks' poetry is among the finest ever created in England and he deserves to far better known then he is at the moment.

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