A Night-Piece

Edward Shanks 1892 (London) – 1953



Come out and walk. The last few drops of light
Drain silently out of the cloudy blue;
The trees are full of the dark-stooping night,
The fields are wet with dew.
  
All's quiet in the wood but, far away,
Down the hillside and out across the plain,
Moves, with long trail of white that marks its way,
The softly panting train.
  
Come through the clearing. Hardly now we see
The flowers, save dark or light against the grass,
Or glimmering silver on a scented tree
That trembles as we pass.
  
Hark now! So far, so far ... that distant song ...
Move not the rustling grasses with your feet.
The dusk is full of sounds, that all along
The muttering boughs repeat.
  
So far, so faint, we lift our heads in doubt.
Wind, or the blood that beats within our ears,
Has feigned a dubious and delusive note,
Such as a dreamer hears.
  
Again ... again! The faint sounds rise and fail.
So far the enchanted tree, the song so low...
A drowsy thrush? A waking nightingale?
Silence. We do not know.
  
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Submitted on August 03, 2020

Modified on March 05, 2023

55 sec read
9

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH XXXX IJIJ
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 964
Words 184
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Edward Shanks

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, then as an academic and journalist, and literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction. He was born in London, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He passed his B.A. in History in 1913. He was editor of Granta from 1912-13. He served in World War I with the British Army in France, but was invalided out in 1915, and did administrative work until war's end. He was later a literary reviewer, working for the London Mercury and for a short while a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He was the chief leader-writer for the Evening Standard from 1928 to 1935. The People of the Ruins was a science-fiction novel in which a man wakes after being put into suspended animation, to discover a devastated Britain. more…

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