1 June: Boreham on John Masefield

The Poetry of Reality
This is the birthday of John Masefield. His poetry is the articulation of youth. He is essentially an original: he is always himself; he sees things as nobody else sees them, and he sings them in melodious strains that could have been born in no soul but his. We may have had greater laureates—it is too soon as yet to compare him with his most illustrious predecessors—but we have never had one with a personality more striking or a note more distinctive. At times he takes your breath away; you have to lower the book to your lap every now and again to let the beating of your heart slow down. His work, that is to say, is characteristic of him. Mr. Masefield lives, moves and has his being in a realm of thrills. His career is a surge of romance. He was a born sailor. Indeed, he was made a poet, not by the culture of the schools, but by the rough and tumble of a maritime life.

At the age of 13 he ran away to sea. For two years he worked on a training ship, and then, for twelve months, he served before the mast. He loved the life, and, had he followed his inclination, would be living it still. When at sea, however, he heard another voice calling him back to the land. He was so much in love with the ocean and its ships that he felt an invincible desire to describe them so that others might see them through his eyes. It became a torment to him to enjoy it all to himself. He wanted all the world to see what he was seeing and to feel what he was feeling.

A Sailor Becomes The Songster Of The Sea
He resolved to go ashore, to take any position that offered and to spend his savings on books. It was with a heavy heart that he carried his seachest down the gangway, but his purpose shone clear. With a pound in his pocket he cast about for employment. He worked first on a farm; then in a bakery; then in a barroom; and lastly in a factory. It was a poor substitute for the open sea; but then he was earning money and buying books. Scanty as were his wages, he procured a new book every week. Proudly he bought Chaucer; then Keats and Shelley; and, a little later, Shakespeare, Swinburne, and Rossetti. As he laid each book down, he tried his own prentice hand. Each crude attempt encouraged within him the pleasing hope that, one great day, he himself might be a poet.

Masefield was only 23 when his first book was published. "Saltwater Ballads" has been aptly described as, "a collection of nautical poems in which pirates, buccaneers, and deck hands declare in their own tongue the wonders of sea and storm." The poems throb with the energy and excitement of youth. The world liked them. Having struck his trail, the young poet followed its course with a confident and buoyant stride. In each of the books that flowed in quick succession from his pen, Masefield makes you feel that he enjoys life in all its phases and that he dearly loves to tell you all about it. He is the poet of stark fact. Wordsworth is not more fond than he is of nightingales and daffodils; but Masefield is at his best in delineating the less idyllic and more prosaic aspects of existence. Whether in the physical or moral realm, he revels in things virile and terrific. He glories in strong winds, strong ships, strong men, and even in strong language. Some of Masefield's lines are like nothing else on earth. After reading a typical page, you seem to have been watching a drunkard riding home, but the drunkard sings as he staggers and Masefield catches the lilt of his song. He has been charged with coarseness and brutality; but this, as Mr. Anthony Clyne has pointed out, arises from a misinterpretation of his temperament. His strange oaths, blatant phrases and harsh rhymes arise from the poet's sensitiveness to the beauty of reality. To him there is nothing so artistic as life in the raw.

Setting Life's Unloveliness To Music
Masefield touches the repulsive things of life; but he touches them in such a way that he makes them appear repulsive. Vice, in his pages, is always hideous; goodness is always charming. And, then, in "The Everlasting Mercy," he strikes a still deeper and more positive note. Like all his poems, it is a song of adventure. But, in this case, the adventure is a spiritual adventure; the romance is the romance of the soul. "It is," as Sir Edmund Gosse declared, "a poem which would make memorable any year in recent literary history. It is a narrative of conversion; a story of the light of God breaking through the cracks which pain and shame have made. As we read, we feel the mysterious pulse of humanity beating and throbbing all around us." Sir W. R. Nicoll described it as one of the most arresting conversion stories ever written. In 1912 the Academy Committee of the Royal Society of Literature awarded the poem, the Edmond de Polignac prize of £100.

The poem is the dramatic personal history of Saul Kane, a desperate and abandoned profligate; and it is told in his own wild, yet strangely eloquent, speech. Here again the contradictory genius of John Masefield reveals itself. The introductory section of the poem begins with a blood-curdling description of Kane's youth:—

From '41 to '51,
I was my folks' contrary son;
I bit my father's hand
right through
And broke my mother's heart in two.

And This Is How The Section Closes:

I cursed; 'twould make a man turn pale;
And nineteen times I went to
gaol.
Now, friends, observe, and look upon me
Hark how the Lord took pity
on me.

That is his point. He does not shock us for the sheer sake of shocking us. He does not glory in his shame. It is, as Mr. Sturgeon points out, a revelation of the way in which a human soul, rising from bestiality, can obtain a joyous perception of the real meaning of life. In "The Everlasting Mercy," John Masefield is at his best and at his worst; but nobody will read either that or any of his verses without rejoicing that a singer of such natural gifts and evident distinction has won academic recognition in an age in which so many minstrels go uncrowned.

F W Boreham

Image: John Masefield