Edward Shanks (1892–1953) was an English poet, critic and journalist associated with the Georgian poets, whose musical, often rural lyrics marked the years just before and during the First World War. “Shadows” comes from that early imaginative world, turning away from public noise to a private meeting-place beneath an oak. A speaker asks a lover to step into the dark, not to hide but to “mingle with the darkness and be lost.” The poem’s central insight is that darkness can be a kind of purification: when sight is folded away, the sense of touch becomes more vivid, more intimate and almost sacred.
Shanks shapes that invitation through a loose lyric form. Most lines move in steady iambic pentameter, but he repeatedly shortens the line to a whispered pause: “O in the shadow there,” “With lips obscure,” “But tangibly.” These interruptions make the verse feel like a voice lowering itself in the dark. Rhyme works as a soft enclosure, pairing “shade” with “fade,” “lost” with “ghost,” “hush” with “bush.” The repeated sounds are not heavy; they blur the edges of each phrase. Enjambment adds to the drifting sensation, especially when the “leafy hedges fade / Into the darkness like a curling smoke,” so that the sentence loses its outline just as the landscape does.
The imagery makes darkness into a material and even holy thing. Shanks describes “oil of night” that can “soothe the straining eyes,” as if darkness were a balm poured over overused sight. The word “anointed” later turns the lovers into initiates of a private ritual: the night “knows for its anointed how to keep / A magic darkness, an enchanted hush.” That vocabulary—oil, anointed, magic, enchanted—gives the shade an almost religious seriousness, but without making it solemn. The lovers are imagined as “viewless ghost with viewless ghost,” unseen to each other yet still able to “meet, caress and shiver with sweet pain.” The word “viewless” matters because it means both invisible and without the power of seeing; what remains is presence, closeness, and skin.
The poem’s key oppositions are woven through the lines rather than stated as abstract ideas. “Invisibly” recurs as the lovers “lie in each other’s arms invisibly / And touch and see not, kiss and kiss again.” Then, after so many images of obscured sight, Shanks isolates “But tangibly” on a short line. That word is the quiet climax. The landscape also enacts this enclosure: the “low stars” and “low clouds” hang close over the “tremendous oak” and “mighty tree,” as though the sky were lowering a curtain. The “uncertain bush” loses its clear outline, yet it offers shelter. In such a space, lips described as “obscure” can still find their way “as ardent and as sure / In darkness as in day.”
What makes “Shadows” significant is its reversal of the usual meanings of darkness. Instead of fear, confusion or concealment, darkness becomes a chosen medium of intimacy. Shanks suggests that losing one sense may strengthen another: when “all senses” are “gone, / Save only one bright sense — save touch alone,” the body’s least public form of knowledge becomes the most truthful. This is also a small Georgian retreat, an attempt to protect a tender human space from the demands of a world about to be broken by war. The poem remains compelling because it treats shadow not as absence but as presence, and because it makes touch feel luminous.