Wilfred Owen

Shadwell Stair

Summary


"Shadwell Stair" is a poem by Wilfred Owen that conjures a spectral figure haunting the wharves and waterways of London's Thames at night. The narrator declares itself a ghost wandering past slaughterhouses and shipping docks, yet paradoxically claims living flesh and luminous eyes. With each stanza the atmosphere deepens — burning street-lamps, the dolorous clank of vessels, a tide that turns as if drawn by the phantom's presence — until dawn breaks over Shadwell Stair and the ghost retreats to rest beside another.

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I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,
And eyes tumultuous as the gems
Of moons and lamps in the full Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns
Where I watch always; from the banks
Dolorously the shipping clanks
And after me a strange tide turns.

I walk till the stars of London wane
And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.
But when the crowing syrens blare
I with another ghost am lain.

Credits

Wilfred Owen was a British poet born in 1893, best known for his devastatingly candid verse about the First World War, in which he served and died just one week before the Armistice. "Shadwell Stair" stands apart from his war poetry as a rare urban nocturne, believed to have been written around 1917 and drawing on the eerie, fog-wrapped atmosphere of London's East End docklands.
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