Edward Shanks belonged to the generation of English poets who came of age before the First World War and wrote in its long shadow. Associated with the Georgian movement, he favoured traditional lyric forms and rural English settings, often using them to register quiet desolation rather than patriotic confidence. “The Empty House II” comes out of that mood: a sonnet set in an abandoned farmstead, where the speaker and a companion pause before a ruined building, sense its strange invitation, and then move on across the landscape.
The poem describes a house that has lost its door, its roof thickened with moss, its windows staring with “blank and empty eye.” The flagstones have split apart and seem to grin through their cracks. Nature is repossessing the place: unpruned orchard trees lift “white boughs of trembling flame,” and long wild grasses brush the visitors’ knees. The central idea emerges when the ruin becomes more than scenery. The “dumb house” appears to call, and its black opening has stood waiting “in vain” for someone to enter. For a moment the walkers imagine that the old walls hold a “store / Of rest” for them, as if the past might offer shelter. But the poem closes with a quiet refusal: “Then turned away to cross the further hill.” The house symbolises the desire to return to a lost home, a lost self, or even the dead; the final line insists that life’s path runs elsewhere, beyond the ruin.
Formally, Shanks uses a Shakespearean sonnet pattern, three quatrains and a couplet, with rhymes running awry, slow, eye, below and came, trees, flame, knees. The steady iambic rhythm is almost unsettling against the decay it describes, as though the mind keeps walking in orderly steps through a world that has fallen apart. The sonnet’s turn comes not at the final couplet but at the ninth line, when the house shifts from an object observed to a presence that “called to us.” That personification gives the ruin an eerie agency: windows stare, flagstones grin, the wide door stands open “in vain.” The atmosphere is one of muffled grief rather than horror. The house is “dumb,” unable to explain what it wants or what it has lost.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. Shanks does not say who once lived in the house, why it was abandoned, or what the speaker is seeking. The empty door and the “foolish cattle” wandering through the orchard are enough to suggest a whole rural world undone, a familiar theme in the years after the First World War. The promise of “rest” remains ambiguous: it could be shelter, memory, death, or simply the peace of not travelling. The final image of the “further hill” refuses consolation. The walkers sigh, then turn away, leaving the house to its moss and cracks. That unresolved movement gives the poem its quiet power: it honours the pull of the past without pretending it can be entered again.