Edward Shanks, an English poet and critic born in 1892, belonged to the Georgian generation that valued clear feeling, rural imagery, and traditional verse. He wrote “In Absence” in the years around the First World War, while still in his early twenties, when that style seemed capable of holding private emotion without strain. The poem is a fourteen-line love sonnet, but it behaves less like a declaration than like an incantation. Its speaker walks alone through a woodland at dusk, remembering times when he walked there with his beloved, and asks her to be near him. By the final lines, however, the beloved has not returned; instead, the speaker has conjured a ghost of her, a flickering presence that answers to her name and leaves him more isolated.
The central idea is that absence is not simple emptiness. It is an active, almost supernatural force that rewrites a familiar landscape. The “sparse woodland in the fading light” is already a threshold space, neither fully day nor night. In the octave, memory fills that threshold with sensory detail: the “loud nightjar” spinning its note, the “wild rose folded up for sleep,” the sound of the beloved’s name whispered “across the valley deep.” Those remembered details are tender but fragile; the rose is closed, the light is going, and the whispered word chokes in the throat. The poem suggests that to remember intensely is to begin to haunt the present moment.
The sonnet’s construction sharpens that idea. Shanks uses a mostly iambic pentameter and a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, but he bends the form into a circle. The opening line, “My lovely one, be near to me to-night,” returns as the final line, and the ninth line repeats the plea in shortened form: “Be near to me, for now I need you most.” This refrain-like repetition gives the poem an incantatory rhythm, as if the speaker believes that saying the request often enough might make her present. But the repeated words also reveal the failure of that belief. What actually appears is not the woman but “an unsubstantial flame” flickering along the shadowy paths, “a ghost / That turned to me and answered to your name.” The word “unsubstantial” is crucial: the vision has light and movement yet no body, no weight. It is a memory that has detached itself from the past and begun to move through the present.
The ghost is not comforting. It answers to her name, but it also mocks the speaker with “a wraith of far delight.” That phrase gathers the poem’s key vocabulary of distance and illusion: “far,” “wraith,” “delight.” The remembered woodland was full of closeness; the present woodland is full of shadows and flickering. The nightjar’s “pleasant note” has been replaced by silence or, worse, by the false answer of a ghost. Even the sonnet’s closing ellipsis before the final line creates a pause, a held breath, as if the speaker knows the plea will not bring her nearer. He still says it, because longing has no other language.
What makes the poem significant is its psychological accuracy beneath a conventional surface. Shanks does not treat absence as a poetic pose. He shows how ordinary grief can turn a familiar path into alien territory, where a bank of evening mist or a shifting light becomes a presence. The sonnet, a form usually devoted to the beloved’s living image, becomes here a small séance. It begins and ends with the same line because true absence cannot be resolved, only re-entered. That circular movement is the poem’s quiet power: the speaker is not moving toward acceptance but deeper into the haunted space his own memory has made.