Edward Shanks wrote short poems that behave a little like optical illusions, and “Recollection” is one of his quietest. Born in 1892, Shanks was a poet and critic associated with the Georgian Poetry movement in early twentieth-century England. The Georgians valued clear, musical verse rooted in the natural world, often offering the countryside as a space of close observation and retreat. “Recollection” sits inside that tradition but pushes it toward something more mysterious: it preserves a moment of mistaken perception as if the error were more valuable than mere accuracy.
The poem describes a hawthorn hedge above a pool at dusk. In the first couplet, the hawthorn is “pale as frost” and nearly disappears against “the paling sky.” Below, on the pool’s “dark sheet,” white water-daisies “glow.” In the second quatrain, the speaker remembers approaching and seeing the water “littered, star on star.” From a distance, the scattered water-daisies look so much like fallen blossom that he thinks “the may had left its hedge / To float upon the pool’s dark edge.” May, or hawthorn blossom, appears to have let go of the hedge and drifted down. The central idea is not just a botanical mix-up; the recollection matters because the mistake uncovers a genuine visual rhyme between the white may above and the white water-daisies below. What memory keeps is an instant when hedge and pool seemed to exchange flowers, revealing a hidden unity between air and water.
That sense of quiet discovery is built into the form. The eight lines move in a steady four-beat rhythm, close to iambic tetrameter, which gives the poem the calm pace of a walker approaching a familiar spot. The rhymes arrive in couplets—frost / lost, below / glow, far / star, hedge / edge—and each pairing closes a small observation with a soft click. The couplet form itself mirrors the poem’s doubleness: above and below, hedge and pool, may and water-daisies, reality and mistaken impression. Shanks binds the two landscapes together with sound, too. The p and l sounds in “pale,” “paling,” “pool,” and “littered” move from sky to water as if the same breath crosses both.
Imagery and word choice deepen the confusion. The pool is a “dark sheet,” a phrase that suggests both a smooth cloth and a page waiting for marks. Against that dark ground, the “candid water-daisies glow,” and “candid” gives them an innocent, open brightness. The phrase “star on star” turns the pool into a second sky, so the water no longer simply contains flowers; it mirrors constellations. The word “edge” in the final line is especially important, because the poem keeps returning to boundaries—the hedge’s edge, the pool’s edge, the line between seeing and remembering—and then lets one thing cross into another.
What makes “Recollection” significant is its trust in a beautiful error. Rather than correcting the speaker’s misreading, the poem preserves it, because that misreading reveals how deeply the evening’s whiteness connects hedge, blossom, water, and sky. The floating may has never actually left the hedge, yet the imagined image feels truer than the botanical fact. For readers, the poem offers a model of attention: close looking can turn a random mistake into a lasting act of imagination. It is an eight-line memory, but its reflection lingers.