Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

Edward Shanks

I am sending you a sonnet by Edward Shanks, considered to be “one of our best younger poets”:

O dearest, if the touch of common things

Can taint our love or wither, let it die.

The freest-hearted lark that soars and sings

Soon after dawn amid a dew-brushed sky

Takes song from love and knows well where love lies,

Hid in the grass, the dear domestic nest,

The secret, splendid, common paradise.

The strangest joys are not the loveliest;

Passion far-sought is dead when it is found,

But love that’s born of intimate common things

Cries with a voice of splendour, with a sound

That over stranger feeling shakes and rings.

The best of love, the highest ecstasy

Lies in the intimate touch of you and me.

I do not know whether you intended me to comment on the sonnet of Shanks — Phoebus, what a name!! I am not in love with it, though it is smoothly and musically rhythmed. The sentiment is rather namby-pamby, some of the lines weak, others too emphatic, e.g. the twelfth. It just misses being a really good poem, or is so, like the curate’s egg, in parts. E.g. the two opening lines of the third verse are excellent, but they are immediately spoiled by two lines that shout and rattle. So too the last couplet promises well in its first line, but the last disappoints, it is too obvious a turn and there is no fusion of the idea with the emotion that ought to be there — and isn’t. Still, the writer is evidently a poet and the sonnet very imperfect but by no means negligible.

12 June 1931