When I saw first this blood and thunder poet, he was not the tweedy, breezy sea-salt I had expected. He was spare, quiet and with luminous blue eyes. He read his poems on a warm summer evening in Faringdon Church in aid of the restoration of that handsome old building and his voice, though weak, high and a bit quavery, filled the whole church and thrilled the audience. He was a practised verse speaker and all his poems were written to be read aloud. He tells us in his autobiography So Long to Learn how much he enjoyed telling stories in verse.
JOHN BETJEMAN: Preface to John Masefield: Selected Poems (1978)
During his happy early childhood at Ledbury in Herefordshire, Masefield learnt poetry by heart before he could read, and in later life cited Tennyson’s ‘The dying swan’ and Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember’ as the first poems that had moved him. The idyllic days did not last; his mother died when he was six, his father suffered a mental breakdown soon after, and he was brought up by an aunt who had no love of literature and frowned on his literary aspirations. He was sent to King’s School, Warwick, and subsequently, aged fourteen, received his naval training on board the HMS Conway. He sailed as an apprentice on a ship bound for Chile via Cape Horn, suffered appalling seasickness, and described the experience in his verse narrative Dauber, the story of an artist who, though mocked by the crew, continued to paint pictures:
Down in his bunk the Dauber lay awake
Thinking of his unfitness for the sea.
Having spent a period recuperating at home, he set sail on his second ship – which he deserted in New York. In America he became a vagrant, worked as a bartender in the Amerian capital, and then spent two years as an employee in a Yonkers carpet factory – a job which gave him ample time to read widely and hone his literary skills. He discovered Chaucer in 1896 and describes his excitement in the Preface to Poems (New York, 1935): ‘I first felt the real delight of poetry in a room in Yonkers, New York. It was there that I decided that I had rather write verse than do anything else in the world.’ He left America in 1897, and docked in Liverpool with six pounds and a revolver. Having approached Yeats for advice, he regularly attended the Irish poet’s Monday evening gatherings, where he met a number of luminaries who helped him in his career. Between 1902 and 1911 he published no fewer than eighteen books (novels, plays and poems), including Nan (1908), which Yeats called ‘a wonderful play – the best English play since the Elizabethans’ (recorded by Synge in a letter to Molly Allgood, dated 11 January 1908). During the First World War he served with the Red Cross in France, and also aboard a hospital ship in the Gallipoli campaign of 1916. Though Masefield’s career as a sailor was short and unsatisfactory, he remains England’s most celebrated writer of the sea.
Masefield was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, despite competition from Housman, Kipling, Yeats and de la Mare. He received the support of The Times, who were delighted that the post had been awarded to a poet who had not gone to university and who could ‘touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life’. In 1933, he created the Royal Medal for Poetry over which he presided – recipients of the award included Auden, Betjeman and Sassoon. He made a speciality of the realistic long narrative. Dauber (1913) is a remarkable depiction of life at sea and the plight of the frustrated artist; The Everlasting Mercy (1911) was particularly well received for the frankness of its language and the way in which it depicted the life of the country labourer without sentimentality or glamour; and Reynard the Fox (1919) was a successful attempt at reviving the character portrait familiar to us from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Despite the success of these volumes, it is a few of Masefield’s shorter poems that have lasted best. He produced volumes of lyric poetry at regular intervals throughout his career: Salt-Water Ballads (1902), The Daffodil Fields (1913), Good Friday and Other Poems (1916), Lollingdon Downs and Other Poems (1917), King Cole and Other Poems (1923), A Letter from Pontus and Other Verse (1936) and In Glad Thanksgiving (1967). Of all these, it is Salt-Water Ballads that has remained his most popular collection. The title was suggested by Masefield’s publisher, Grant Richards, and Masefield came to dislike it, as it implied a parallel with Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Both poets, it’s true, make liberal use of the vernacular, but Masefield, in his opening poem, ‘A consecration’, proclaims that he is concerned with pariahs, the despised and despairing, not heroes or imperialists. (‘Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth […]/Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!’) To his sister, Norah, he wrote: ‘I have never been influenced in any way by Rudyard Kipling’s verse (which I hate, and which I haven’t read for three or four years). Our methods are quite distinct, and one might just as well say that Kipling got his manner from Burns as that I got mine from Kipling.’ He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1935.
I must go down2 to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
It’s pleasant in Holy Mary
By San Marie lagoon1,
The bells they chime and jingle
From dawn to afternoon.
They rhyme and chime and mingle,
They pulse and boom and beat,
And the laughing bells are gentle
And the mournful bells are sweet.
Oh, who are the men that ring them,
The bells of San Marie,
Oh, who but sonsie2 seamen
Come in from over sea,
And merrily in the belfries
They rock and sway and hale3,
And send the bells a-jangle,
And down the lusty ale.
It’s pleasant in Holy Mary
To hear the beaten bells
Come booming into music,
Which throbs, and clangs, and swells,
From sunset till the daybreak,
From dawn to afternoon,
In port of Holy Mary
On San Marie lagoon.
Dunno a heap about the what an’ why,
Can’t say’s I ever knowed.
Heaven to me’s a fair blue stretch of sky,
Earth’s jest a dusty road.
Dunno the names o’ things, nor what they are,
Can’t say’s I ever will.
Dunno about God – He’s jest the noddin’ star
Atop the windy hill.
Dunno about Life – it’s jest a tramp alone
From wakin’-time to doss.
Dunno about Death – it’s jest a quiet stone
All over-grey wi’ moss.
An’ why I live, an’ why the old world spins,
Are things I never knowed;
My mark’s the gypsy fires, the lonely inns,
An’ jest the dusty road.
Man is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth.
Life was lived nobly here to give this body birth.
Something was in this brain and in this eager hand.
Death is so dumb and blind, Death cannot understand.
Death drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs’ glory.
Death makes women a dream and men a traveller’s story,
Death drives the lovely soul to wander under the sky,
Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
(Gibbs)
The text that Gurney misremembered in the trenches:
This is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth.
Life was lived nobly there to give such beauty birth.
Beauty was in that heart and in that eager hand.
Death is so blind and dumb, death does not understand.
Death drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs’ glory.
Death makes justice a dream and strength a traveller’s story.
Death makes the lovely soul to wander under the sky.
Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.
Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.
Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.
Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.
And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.
Silent are the woods, and the dim green boughs are
Hushed in the twilight: yonder, in the path through
The apple orchard, is a tired plough-boy
Calling the cows home.
A bright white star blinks, the pale moon rounds, but
Still the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset
Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on
The misty hill-tops.
Ghostly it grows, and darker, the burning
Fades into smoke, and now the gusty oaks are
A silent army of phantoms thronging
A land of shadows.
In the harbour, in the island, in the Spanish Seas,
Are the tiny white houses and the orange-trees,
And day-long, night-long, the cool and pleasant breeze
Of the steady Trade Winds blowing.
There is the red wine, the nutty Spanish ale,
The shuffle of the dancers, the old salt’s tale,
The squeaking fiddle, and the soughing1 in the sail
Of the steady Trade Winds blowing.
And o’ nights there’s fire-flies and the yellow moon,
And in the ghostly palm-trees the sleepy tune
Of the quiet voice calling me, the long low croon
Of the steady Trade Winds blowing.
It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where,
Going through meadow and village, one knows not whither nor
why;
Through the grey light drift of the dust, in the keen cool rush of the air,
Under the flying white clouds, and the broad blue lift of the sky;
And to halt at the chattering brook, in the tall green fern at the brink
Where the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the fox-gloves purple and white;
Where the shy-eyed delicate deer troop down to the pools to drink,
When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night.
O! to feel the warmth of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth,
Is a tune for the blood to jig to, a joy past power of words;
And the blessed green comely meadows seem all a-ripple with mirth
At the lilt of the shifting feet, and the dear wild cry of the birds.
(Head)
I saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing, a-sailing,
With emeralds and rubies and sapphires in her hold;
And a bosun in a blue coat bawling at the railing,
Piping through a silver call that had a chain of gold;
The summer wind was failing and the tall ship rolled.
I saw a ship a-steering, a-steering, a-steering,
With roses in red thread worked upon her sails;
With sacks of purple amethysts, the spoils of buccaneering,
Skins1 of musky yellow wine, and silks in bales,
Her merry men were cheering, hauling on the brails2.
I saw a ship a-sinking, a-sinking, a-sinking,
With glittering sea-water splashing on her decks,
With seamen in her spirit-room singing songs and drinking,
Pulling claret bottles down, and knocking off the necks,
The broken glass was chinking as she sank among the wrecks.
(Gardiner)
Weary the cry of the wind is, weary the sea,
Weary the heart and the mind and the body o’ me.
Would I were out of it, done with it, would I could be
A white gull crying along the desolate sands!
Outcast, derelict soul in a body accurst,
Standing drenched with the spindrift2, standing athirst,
For the cool green waves of death to arise and burst
In a tide of quiet for me on the desolate sands.
Would that the waves and the long white hair o’ the spray
Would gather in splendid terror and blot me away
To the sunless place o’ the wrecks where the waters sway
Gently, dreamily, quietly over desolate sands!
Oh some are fond of red wine, and some are fond of white
And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight;
But rum alone’s the tipple, and the heart’s delight
Of the old bold mate of Henry Morgan2.
Oh some are fond of Spanish wine, and some are fond of French,
And some’ll swallow tay3 and stuff fit only for a wench;
But I’m for right Jamaica till I roll beneath the bench,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
Oh some are for the lily, and some are for the rose,
But I am for the sugar-cane that in Jamaica grows;
For it’s that that makes the bonny drink to warm my copper nose,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
Oh some are fond of fiddles, and a song well sung,
And some are all for music to lilt upon the tongue;
But mouths were made for tankards, and for sucking at the bung,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
[Oh some are fond of dancing, and some are fond of dice,
And some are all for red lips, and pretty lasses’ eyes;
But a right Jamaica puncheon4 is a finer prize
To the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.]
Oh some that’s good and godly ones they hold that it’s a sin
To troll the jolly bowl around, and let the dollars spin;
But I’m for toleration and for drinking at an inn,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
[Oh some are sad and wretched folk that go in silken suits,
And there’s a mort of5 wicked rogues that live in good reputes;
So I’m for drinking honestly, and dying in my boots,
Like an old bold mate of Henry Morgan.]
(Gurney)
Oh London Town’s a fine town, and London sights are rare,
And London ale is right ale, and brisk’s the London air,
And busily goes the world there, but crafty grows the mind,
And London Town of all towns I’m glad to leave behind.
Then hey for croft and hop-yard, and hill, and field, and pond,
With Bredon Hill before me and Malvern Hill beyond,
The hawthorn white i’ the hedgerow, and all the spring’s attire
In the comely land of Teme and Lugg, and Clent, and Clee, and Wyre.
Oh London girls are brave girls, in silk and cloth o’ gold,
And London shops are rare shops, where gallant things are sold,
And bonnily clinks the gold there, but drowsily blinks the eye,
And London Town of all towns I’m glad to hurry by.
Then, hey for covert and woodland, and ash and elm and oak,
Tewkesbury inns, and Malvern roofs, and Worcester chimney smoke,
The apple trees in the orchard, the cattle in the byre,
And all the land from Ludlow town to Bredon church’s spire.
Oh London tunes are new tunes, and London books are wise,
And London plays are rare plays, and fine to country eyes,
Wretchedly fare the most there, and happily fare the few,
And London Town of all towns I’m glad to hurry through.
So hey for the road, the west road, by mill and forge and fold,
Scent of the fern and song of the lark by brook, and field, and wold,
To the comely folk at the hearth-stone and the talk beside the fire,
In the hearty land, where I was bred, my land of heart’s desire.
(German)
And he came by her cabin to the west of the road, calling. There was a strong love came up in her at that, and she put down her sewing on the table, and ‘Mother,’ she says, ‘there’s no lock, and no key, and no bolt, and no door. There’s no iron, nor no stone, nor anything at all will keep me this night from the man I love.’ And she went out into the moonlight to him, there by the bush where the flowers is pretty, beyond the river. And he says to her: ‘You are all the beauty of the world, will you come where I go, over the waves of the sea?’ And she says to him: ‘My treasure and my strength,’ she says, ‘I would follow you on the frozen hills, my feet bleeding.’
Then they went down into the sea together, and the moon made a track upon the sea, and they walked down it; it was like a flame before them. There was no fear at all on her; only a great love like the love of the Old Ones, that was stronger than the touch of the fool. She had a little white throat, and little cheeks like flowers, and she went down into the sea with her man, who wasn’t a man at all. She was drowned, of course. It’s like he never thought that she wouldn’t bear the sea like himself. She was drowned, drowned.