the modern representative of a tradition that goes back to the ancients. A third irony is that it actually exists, whereas the others are gone, though, of course, it too will become a thing of the past. Here, Masefield makes skillful use of meter and stanza form, the unusual number of spondees imparting a feeling of strength, reinforced by the periodic use of two short lines rather than a single long one. Masefield made light of objections that a ship from Nineveh was not plausible because Nineveh was two hundred miles inland. As Constance Babington Smith notes inJohn Masefield: A Life (1978), he responded to a question of an Eton boy: “I can only suggest that a Ninevean syndicate must have chartered the ship; even so it was odd.” The first line of the poem is musical in its repetition of sounds, including the n, short i, and v. It is not improbable that the poet chose Nineveh for its alliterative and evocative qualities.

As the modern freighter in “Cargoes” is less distinguished than its antecedents, the modern city in “London Town” is less pleasant than the country and the small town. Masefield is speaking in his own voice here, for in the last line he speaks of the land in which he was bred, and the countryside described is his homeland. The poet alternates stanzas in praise of London with stanzas in praise of the country, but all those in praise of London end with a defect or a deficiency, with a varied refrain in favor of leaving the place. In two of these stanzas, the deficiency is given in only a half line of contrast, as in the statement that the world is busy there, while the mind grows “crafty.” The alternate stanzas praise the countryside without reservation and are prefaced with a joyous song like “Then hey” or “So hey.” The poem is joyous in the delight of the poet in returning to the world of nature, but the criticism of the city is sobering. In the last stanza about London, it hardly matters that the tunes, books, and plays are excellent if “wretchedly fare the most there and merrily fare the few.” The city is a tragic place, for beneath its artifice there is misery and poverty. The irony is somewhat like that of Masefield’s long narrative poem Reynard the Fox, in which the hunters seek an exciting diversion, while the fox is only trying desperately to survive.

The Everlasting Mercy

Masefield’s homeland, described in the country scenes in “London Town” and other poems, includes the Malvern Hills mentioned at the beginning of The Vision of William, Concerning Piers the Plowman (c. 1362, A Text; c. 1377, B Text; c. 1393, C Text; also known as Piers Plowman), and the influence of that work is apparent in Masefield’s long narrative poem The Everlasting Mercy. Masefield had resolved to write about the lowly, and some of the lowly are anything but perfect. Saul Kane bit through his father’s hand and went to jail nineteen times, but he tells the reader in a monologue that is part soliloquy and part public attestation that he regrets breaking his mother’s heart. He says, “Now, friends, observe and look upon me” to see evidence of the Lord’s pity; it is an address to the reader that is reminiscent of the medieval religious lyrics in which Christ tells the reader to look at how his side bleeds or in which the Blessed Virgin invites the reader to weep with her. The effect is that the figure, whether it be Christ or Saul Kane, becomes a static moral picture. It is short-lived here, however, as Saul plunges into his story of a poaching-rights argument, boxing, and celebration.

The otherworldly passages in the poem are instrumental in Saul’s religious conversion to a different way of life, the first of them being Saul’s remembrance on his way to the celebration of how the bell ringer had seen spirits dancing around the church at Christmas. The whole eerie scene becomes vivid to him, and he prays when he thinks of Judgment Day. After the party, he leans out the window and is tempted by the devil to throw himself down, even as Christ was tempted. He decides not to kill himself and feels exalted; he wants to excoriate the righteous, who would secretly like to be whores and sots and who “make hell for all the odd/ All the lonely ones of God.” After this realization, he runs through the town and rings the fire bell. After he speaks out to the squire’s parson for his actions toward the poor, he is upbraided by the mother of a lost child whom he had befriended; when she summons the mystical imagery of the Book of Revelation, he shrinks away. After he insults a Quaker woman who visits the bar and then leaves, exhorting him, he suddenly feels, in a mystical passage about tide, sun, moon, and bells ringing for someone coming home, that he has been converted. Feeling that he was born to “brother” everyone, he sees everything symbolically, from mole to plowman, and says that Christ will plow at the “bitter roots” of his heart.

First Christ and then Saul become plowmen, a transformation reminiscent of Piers Plowman. At the end of the work, where the meter changes from iambic tetrameter to a more lyrical trimeter, he seems to have awakened to the beauty of nature. The poem is enhanced by its many ironies, such as that Saul should experience the world of the spirit while he is drunk, and that Saul, of all people, could become a patient plowman and a Christlike figure. Some of the names in the story are symbolic: certainly Saul and Miss Bourne, the Quaker, and possibly Saul’s last name, Kane (Cain). Although Saul is not exactly Everyman, his life in its aimlessness, belligerence, and unhappiness embodies a tragic pattern of human existence that is not uncommon. Masefield was not religious in the traditional sense, but he seems to have believed in reincarnation and to have been fascinated by religion, a number of his works being on religious themes. This poem was a sensation in its time; it was considered shocking for its direct language and crudity. Sir James Barrie, however, described it in the Daily Chronicle of November 29, 1912, as “incomparably the best literature of the year.”

“CLM”

Because his story poems, sea poems, and songs are so vivid, Masefield’s more subdued philosophical poems have been generally neglected. “CLM,” a tragic work about women and motherhood, was written during his wife’s second pregnancy, when he was romantically involved with Elizabeth Robins, whom he called Mother. The letters of the poem’s title stand for the name of Masefield’s actual mother. Speaking of his prenatal life, the poet sees the fetus as common earth and as a leech. Pregnancy is “months of birth,” and birth itself is hell. His present life involves the death of “some of her,” some cells he received from her; thus, the subject of death is first raised in connection with his own life. Not until the second stanza does the reader become aware that the speaker’s mother is dead. Both the womb and the grave are dark.

There is a cluster of images associated with his desire to see her again, together with the uncertain nature of such an encounter: gates of the grave, knocking, “dusty” doors, her “dusty” beauty, and passersby in the street. He feels that he has not repaid his debt of life to her and to other women, and he uses the images of men triumphing over women, trampling on their rights and lusting after them, to convey men’s selfishness and their subjugation of women. At the end of the poem, in an ironic and tragic reversal of his desire to see his mother again, he tells the grave to stay shut so that he will not be shamed. The shut grave image stands in strong contrast to the earlier image of its opening.

Dauber

Much of Masefield’s more philosophical poetry was concerned with beauty. Some of his ideas on this theme were embodied in the narrative poem Dauber, in which a young artist becomes a sailor because he wants to paint ships and sea life as they have never been painted before. His insensitive shipmates, however, destroy his paintings. When he dies in a fall from the yardarm during a storm, his last words are, “It will go on.” Ironically, he is mourned not as an artist but as a fine sailor-to-be.

Beauty and death

The worship of beauty and the linking of beauty and tragedy in human life were recurrent themes in Masefield’s sonnets. Beauty exists in nature and within the individual, despite the reality of death, and beauty exists in a life to come. Beauty and death are related, for, as he says in one sonnet, the life that was is “Pasture to living beauty.” The beautiful may die, but Beauty will go on. The personified Beauty of many of his sonnets seems to be an amalgam of the goddess Nature, the world soul of Platonic philosophy, God, the Beatrice of Dante, and the women in the poet’s life. “On Growing Old” asks Beauty to be with him as he sits amid the imagery of age and death: an old dog, his own coldness by the fire, the yellow leaves of a book, the embers. The word “her” indicates that Beauty possesses the seas and land where he is no longer able to go. Comparing himself to a beggar in the Strand, he asks Beauty for gifts—ironically, not youth, but wisdom and passion, which he compares to bread and to rain in a dry summer. They are necessities in the closing darkness of old age and death, for with them “Even the night will blossom as the rose.”

Masefield, then, was a more philosophical poet than is generally realized. Beauty was a kind of goddess in his work, and a kind of quest as well; he was fascinated by the interrelationship of beauty with tragedy and death. It was also no accident that he chose to retell in his verse the tragic tales of Troy, of Arthur, and of Tristan and Isolt, for he dealt in many of his poems with the tragedies and ironies of human life.