Edward Shanks, a British poet and critic who served in the First World War, wrote “The Complaints IV” from the position of a soldier looking back after the intensity of military life has ended. Born in 1892, Shanks belonged to the Georgian generation of poets, writers who often favoured traditional form and direct natural imagery, and that preference is visible here. The poem belongs to a sequence called The Complaints, yet its complaint is not the usual one about battle. It mourns the strange loss of a life in which fear had shape, honour, and even delight.
The speaker begins with a plain but loaded statement: “I was a soldier once.” That “once” immediately separates a vivid past from a diminished present. In memory, fear was not merely terror; it was “mixed with bright honour and delightful pride,” and it made soldiers feel utterly unlike “other men” who merely “lived in houses and in houses died.” The repetition of “houses” turns ordinary civilian existence into something closed and featureless. The war gave the speaker an identity and a physical intensity that peacetime has stolen. Now he is left with a different kind of fear, one “bred / Of money and suchlike maggots in the head.” The central contrast is between fear that ennobled and fear that merely gnaws.
The poem is a sonnet, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ABABCDCD EFEFGG, the same skeleton Shakespeare used. The controlled form works against the emotional confusion of the speaker’s present. The first line has a full stop after “once,” as if the speaker is pausing to swallow. The first eight lines hold his memories: the “huge morning” before the sun “sullenly found us marching in the mist,” the “dark and deep” sleep, the food that awoke a “greedy zest.” Those adjectives—“huge,” “sullenly,” “greedy”—give the remembered world appetite and scale. The turn comes at the ninth line: “But all that’s over.” After that, the sentences shorten and the tone flattens, as if the speaker is forcing himself to accept the end of something he loved.
Shanks’s imagery relies on physical contrast. The body in war is alert, quick, hungry, tired; the body in peace is only a mind gnawed by worry. The phrase “quick to the word and ready to my hand” turns discipline into a kind of pride. The description “smooth and easy moving company” is almost musical, and “marching in column on the heathery land” uses the word “heathery” to make the landscape tactile and specific. A company is not just a military unit but also a kind of companionship. The final couplet is brutal: money is not just a problem but a breeding ground for maggots. That word “maggots” connects to death and decay, yet here it is not a wound in the body but a squirming anxiety in the skull. Fear appears twice in the poem: first as something that could be mixed with pride, last as something purely corrosive.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about a difficult emotion. Many war poems describe terror or grief, but Shanks captures the quieter disappointment of the returned soldier who finds civilian life small and anxious. The poem does not exactly celebrate war, but it admits that danger once gave fear a meaning. That admission is uncomfortable, and the sonnet’s tightly rhymed shape gives it a bitter control. It is a war poem about the peace that followed, and about the maggots that no uniform can protect against.