Apology.

Edward Shanks 1892 (London) – 1953



Have I slept and failed to hear you calling?
Cry again, belov'd; for sleep is heavy,
Curtaining away the golden sunlight,
Shutting out the blue sky and the breezes,
Sealing up my ears to all you tell me.
Cry again! your voice shall pierce the clumsy
Leaden folds that sleep has wrapt about me,
Cry again! accomplish what the singing,
Hours old now on all the trees and bushes,
And the wind and sun could not accomplish.
Lo!    I waste good hours of love and kisses
While the sun and you have spilt your glory
Freely on me lying unregarding.
In the happy islands, where no sunset
Stains the waters with a morbid splendour,
Where the open skies are blue for ever,
I might stay for years and years unsleeping,
Living for divinest conversation,
Music, colour, scent and sense unceasing,
Entering by eye and ear and nostril.
Ah, but flesh is flesh and I am mortal!
Cry again and do not leave me sleeping.
  
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Submitted on August 03, 2020

Modified on March 05, 2023

49 sec read
3

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDBBBAEFEBAGHHAIAJKA
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 880
Words 164
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 22

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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