Educated at Merchant Taylors School, Edward went on to study
at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He Joined the 8th South Lancashire Regiment in
1914. Invalided out in 1915, he had a
desk job for the remainder of the war.
He was known as a war poet of the First World War.
Edward Shanks’ WW1 poetry collections were:
Poems’, Sigwick & Jackson, 1916
‘The Queen of China and other poems’, Martin Secker, 1919
‘Songs (poems)’, The Poetry Bookshop, 1915And his poems were included in six WW1 Anthologies, as well as being published in magazines and newspapers during WW1.
IX. On Account of Ill Health
You go,
brave friends, and I am cast to stay behind,
To read with frowning eyes and discontented
mind
The shining history that you are gone to make,
To sleep with working brain, to dream and to
awake
Into another day of most ignoble peace,
To drowse, to read, to smoke, to pray that war
may cease.
The spring is coming on, and with the spring
you go
In countries where strange scents on the April
breezes blow;
You'll see the primroses marched down into the
mud,
You'll see the hawthorn-tree wear crimson
flowers of blood
And I shall walk about, as I did walk of old,
Where the laburnum trails its chains of
useless gold,
I'll break a branch of may, I'll pick a violet
And see the new-born flowers that soldiers
must forget,
I'll love, I'll laugh, I'll dream and write
undying songs
But with your regiment my marching soul
belongs.
Men that have marched with me and men that I
have led
Shall know and feel the things that I have
only read,
Shall know what thing it is to sleep beneath
the skies
And to expect their death what time the sun
shall rise.
Men that have marched with me shall march to
peace again,
Bringing for plunder home glad memories of
pain,
Of toils endured and done, of terrors quite
brought under,
And all the world shall be their plaything and
their wonder.
Then in that new-born world, unfriendly and
estranged,
I shall be quite alone, I shall be left
unchanged.
From ‘Poems’, dedicated to J.C. Stobart, published by
Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916
