Edward Shanks once wrote a sea-song that never reaches the sea. Born in 1892, Shanks was an English poet, critic and journalist associated with the Georgian Poetry anthologies of the early twentieth century, which favoured rural English subjects, conversational speech and a sceptical humour over the grander gestures of Victorian verse. His “A New Song about the Sea” belongs to that mood. It reads like a smiling reply to the sea-fever that had swept Edwardian poetry—most famously in John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever,” with its ache for “the lonely sea and the sky.” Shanks heads inland, into the Sussex Downs, and makes a cheerful case for staying there.
The poem opens with a tiny geographical circuit: from Amberley to Storrington, back to Amberley, and then on to Washington. These are real villages in West Sussex, and the repetition works like a nursery rhyme, deliberately unheroic. In such places, the speaker observes, “You cannot see or smell the sea.” That flat statement is the poem’s anti-romantic kernel. Instead of tall ships and wild tides, Shanks offers lanes and fields. When he asks, “But why the devil should you wish / To see the home of silly fish?” the humour does the main critical work: it shrinks the ocean from a sublime mystery into a fish tank, and sea-longing into faint absurdity.
The central idea, however, is not simply mockery. The second stanza turns the joke into a tolerant philosophy of separation. The speaker says he prefers “the earth and air,” while the fish may “wallow in the sea” and live the life they prefer. The word “wallow” is especially telling: it gives the fish a lazy, unglamorous existence, far from the heroic voyages and spiritual vastness of traditional sea poetry. There is no bitterness in this division. The final lines, “So wish for each what he may wish, / The earth for me, the sea for fish,” offer a live-and-let-live conclusion. Different creatures, and different temperaments, are entitled to different elements.
The construction supports this light, song-like tone. Each stanza closes with the same neat couplet rhyme, wish and fish, which sounds almost childlike and deflates any high seriousness. The metre moves loosely toward iambic tetrameter, as in “You cannot see or smell the sea,” but the opening place-name litany gives the lines a skipping, local-song quality rather than the rolling swell of maritime verse. In the first stanza, “Storrington” and “Washington” chime through their shared -ington ending, while “Amberley” returns like a refrain, tying the poem to one small corner of England. The vocabulary remains plain and amused: “silly,” “wallow,” “prefer,” “wish.” There are no crashing waves or moonlit horizons, only the sound of a reasonable voice talking back to a romantic cliché.
The poem’s significance lies in its proof that anti-romantic poetry can be affectionate rather than sour. Shanks takes a large literary tradition—the sea as a symbol of escape, danger, eternity and the sublime—and answers it with ordinary common sense. His “new song” is new because it refuses to sing in the old key. By celebrating inland ordinariness and the right to choose one’s own element, it quietly democratises nature poetry. The poem may be small, but its refusal of grandiosity is exactly its point.