Edward Shanks, an English poet and critic born in 1892, served in the First World War and wrote during a period when private emotional landscapes often mirrored public darkness. Associated with the Georgian poets, who valued clear, musical verse over modernist fragmentation, Shanks turned to traditional lyric forms as an anchor, and “The Return I” shows that preference in a fourteen-line sonnet of waking tenderness. Though not a war poem, it belongs to a culture re-learning how to feel after shock and loss, and its story of love returning after apparent death carries quiet historical resonance.
The poem opens not with a beginning but with an end: hearts “long empty of the sun.” That phrase makes absence feel chronic; sunlight has been gone so long that emptiness has become the heart’s normal weather. Then “the morning comes again with golden light,” and the shift from half-dusk to sudden brightness is registered as a physical unclenching: “all the crevices are suddenly bright.” Shanks turns emotional recovery into a change of light, as though the soul were a room with corners that only love can illuminate.
At the center is love personified as a sleeper whose stillness looks like death. The poem is careful to say “So gradually had love lain down to sleep, / We knew it not.” The decline into numbness was so slow it could not be noticed until love lay “pillowed and sunken” in a trance. The word “sunken” makes the face inward, collapsed, almost grave-like, while “we whispered shuddering that he was dead” captures the fear of admitting what has been lost. This is not dramatic betrayal but the more frightening death-in-life of affection that simply stops stirring.
Then the speaker addresses a beloved as Psyche. In the myth, Psyche lights her lamp over a sleeping figure she expects to be a monster and finds the god Cupid; here the “you” bends over “the monster lying in his place” with the same “daring, despairing, trembling.” That triad is central: the act of looking closely at love when it appears monstrous or dead demands courage, because one might discover something impossible to love. Yet the risk is what breaks the trance. As soon as this trembling attention is given, “love raised up his new-awakening face,” and the monstrous possibility vanishes. Shanks suggests that love returns not through force or time alone but through someone willing to lean into the darkness and look.
The sonnet’s architecture supports this movement from chill to warmth. Its iambic pentameter is steady, like breath returning, and the rhyme scheme of three quatrains plus a couplet carries the argument forward before the final two lines release it. The closing couplet returns to the opening image of hearts “long empty of the sun” but now transforms it: “We felt the sky-distilled bright liquor run.” That liquid final image—sunlight become a drink poured into the heart—makes renewal not just seen but tasted and absorbed. It is a sacramental phrase, ordinary and strange at once.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat love’s return as easy. Shanks does not promise that love cannot die; he admits it can fall into a trance indistinguishable from death. But he places enormous faith in the Psyche-like act of bending close with a light, even while trembling. The poem is a small myth of resurrection for ordinary affection, written in a form stable enough to hold the shaking it describes.