[Masefield's] chief dedication is to what he feels is the English spirit and to the interpretation to the world of that spirit, the land and the heritage from which it springs, and the men and words and deeds that it inspires. (p. 15)

From Salt-Water Ballads (1902) to Grace Before Ploughing (1966), there is frequent evidence of [Masefield's] interest in the early years of Britain. In several poems he combines historical reminiscence with his favorite theme of the persistence of human influence in those places where human existence has been especially violent or tragic or beautiful. (p. 22)

In his retelling of the tales of Tristan and of Arthur, Masefield does not follow Malory or any other Arthurian storyteller completely. He even adds new details, new motives, new characterizations of his own, borrowing and inventing freely in the medieval tradition. (p. 27)

Although he shows corruption in medieval government in a manner that constantly suggests modern parallels, Masefield's picture of Arthurian Britain and its people is generally a stirring and attractive one. (p. 30)

Much of Masefield's work, particularly the two early collections of short stories and several later books of verse, shows evidence of his interest in folklore as well as in his nation's history and her heroic legends. (p. 34)

In the second part of [the poem] "August, 1914," Masefield turns to a theme that has a particular fascination for him, a theme that recurs frequently in his poetry and his prose, the concept of immortality "near the men and things we love," of the persistence of the beautiful and the good near the original scene of that beauty and that goodness, a place "inestimably dear." (p. 51)

[The] interest in the old English past, which led eventually to the novel, Badon Parchments (1947), and to the many Arthurian poems, runs through the Lollingdon Downs volume (1917) with the concomitant themes of mutability and the persistent influence of the human spirit upon the land. (p. 52)

Masefield's knowledge of the landscape and the land is intimate and reveals itself over and over again in his poetry and in the descriptive passages of his novels and essays. One need look only at the last pages of The Everlasting Mercy (1911) or at Reynard the Fox (1919) or The Country Scene (1937) to find striking evidence of this detailed and sympathetic knowledge. (p. 56)

In [the novel] The Street of Today, the countryside near Pudsey and Drowcester creates an idyllic background for the courtship of Lionel and Rhoda and initiates some philosophical digressions on the part of the novelist. Masefield writes much more convincingly about the English April than about the love affair of the chief characters, who are stilted, unreal figures with strange conversations and marionette-like behavior. Often only the descriptive passages redeem the book from dullness. (p. 59)

[It is evident that Masefield] makes little use of the English landscape in his prose narratives. His most successful attempts at fiction, Sard Harker and The Bird of Dawning, have employed either the sea or a foreign locale.

An examination of the narrative poetry of Masefield yields a far different conclusion. Of the major narrative poems, only Enslaved (1920) and Rosas (1918) have exotic backgrounds, one African, one Argentine, while Dauber, a sea poem, has one long English episode in flashback. The other six are completely English, except for one Argentine sequence in The Daffodil Fields, and many of the shorter narratives have English settings. (p. 60)

[The role of the English landscape] never assumes the proportions of that of Egdon Heath and the Wessex country of Thomas Hardy, but it is often more than a pleasant backdrop for the action of the narrative. At times the land, its weather, and its plant and animal life reflect and intensify the moods of the characters in the poems;… the landscape is often in contrast to the action, as Masefield employs his favorite device of the juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty, or of the contrast of peace in nature, tumult in man. (p. 61)

["The Love Gift" and "Tristan's Singing"] do not have the reality of the descriptions in the earlier narrative poems. They have a tapestry-like quality, like the pictures in a Chaucerian dream-vision, and the figures of Nature and her attendant creatures have beauty and color, but not life. (p. 72)

Of the long verse narratives by Masefield, the quietest and most serene is King Cole (1921). It is as free from the rush and excitement of Reynard the Fox and Right Royal as it is from the danger and violence of Rosas and Enslaved, the pathos of Dauber and The Widow in the Bye Street, and the mixture of beauty and brutality that characterizes The Everlasting Mercy and The Daffodil Fields. The realism of King Cole is softened and sweetened by an extraordinary atmosphere of fairyland, which pervades the whole poem….

The English countryside is here, but it is touched with the supernatural and shines with the spirit. This is no photograph in black and white or in colors, nor yet is it the tapestry of landscape to be found in some of the minor narratives; this is water color, painted by a versatile artist who may be at his very best in this medium….

Among the most appealing lines in the poem are those which catalogue the English flowers and list the birds and butterflies and creatures of the forest that follow the piping of the spirit-King. Masefield's poetry is thronged with descriptions of animals and flowers and with similes that employ them, attesting to his love for all life. (p. 73)

Masefield is aware of English weather and season and is sensitive to every change and token. He praises midsummer nights, autumn, and winter snow, but most of all he loves April. A concordance to Masefield's poetry would reveal April as one of his favorite words. Not only does he describe springtime beauty and joy, but he uses April as a symbol for all that is fresh and lovely and bright. (p. 75)

At times [Masefield's] characters fail miserably, as individuals and even as types, and he is particularly inept in his portrayal of women. He does show great skill at other times in his presentation of the men he knows best—the English sailor and the English countryman.

A survey of Masefield's fiction and narrative poetry reveals that his favorite characters are countrymen, sailors, and sportsmen. (p. 78)

In the first poem of Salt-Water Ballads (1902), Masefield pledges himself to the common man, the man "with too weighty a burden, too weary a load."…

Many writers have issued credos and manifestos early in their careers and have lived to abandon their beliefs. Masefield is true throughout his life to the men he promises to serve in "A Consecration." Though he writes about the man with "too weary a load" and "the scorned—the rejected," he does not belong to "the literary school which has sprung up from our awakened social conscience." Like Chaucer, he describes and narrates, but, still like Chaucer, he does not moralize or preach. (p. 96)

Often the Masefield hero is the man who achieves spiritual triumph even in physical defeat…. The theme of defeat and failure haunts much of Masefield's work from The Tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910) through the early narrative poems, Good Friday (1916), and Gallipoli (1916), and recurs in ODTAA (1926) and other later work…. The great Masefield quest is for Beauty, Understanding, Truth, and it exacts from the artist the ultimate in courage and sacrifice. (pp. 97-8)

One of Masefield's most notable achievements is the book Gallipoli, prose epic of the heroic and ill-fated Dardanelles campaign of World War I. It is a detailed picture of the campaign, an explanation of the reasons for its failure, and a supreme tribute to the courage of the English soldier and his Anzac ally. It is a beautifully written and moving account of a great victory cloaked in outward failure, and it is perhaps the poet's finest study of Englishmen who become "a story for ever." In Gallipoli, as in "August, 1914," Masefield's love for his countrymen reaches its most eloquent expression. (pp. 98-9)

It is a commonplace to refer to John Masefield as the sea poet or the sailor's laureate; yet only the reader familiar with the great body of Masefield's poetry and prose can realize the extent to which the sea, the ship, and the sailor have dominated Masefield's life and his work. (p. 135)

Throughout Masefield's poetry the sea, the ship, and the sailor appear and reappear. In the most landlocked of poems, a simile or metaphor of the sea will suddenly light up and make vivid an inland scene or an inland thought, for the poet always turns, whenever in search of a clarifying or life-giving image, to the world which he knows and loves best. (p. 156)

When the reader of Masefield leaves the English ship and turns to the sea itself, he will find treatments of the subject varying from the very romantic to the very realistic. It will not surprise him to learn that one of the three earliest extant Masefield poems is called "Sonnet—To the Ocean." The poem is ponderous and grandiose, with none of the grace of the first published poems like "Sea Fever," but it is Masefield's first recorded tribute to "the thunder of the never-silent sea."

Masefield's best-known poem, "Sea Fever," stamped him early as a romanticist. In "Sea Fever," as in "A Wanderer's Song," "Roadways," and other poems from the 1902 and 1903 collections, the picture is clean, clear, bracing, and glorious, with white clouds flying and the wild Atlantic shouting on the sand…. There is a wide range in these early ballads, from the pure beauty of "Sea Fever" to the rough-and-tumble "Bill," "Fever-Chills," and "Burial Party," with their dialect, occasional "bloody's." (pp. 160-61)

With the exception, perhaps, of "Land Workers," Masefield's laureate verse offers little that will enhance his reputation. (p. 212)

These occasional verses are often nobly conceived and gracefully executed, but like most occasional verse they generally bear the unmistakable stamp of the duty done and the deadline met. (p. 214)

Masefield's place among the Poets Laureate is that of a poet well qualified, by practice and by temperament, for his post. His celebration of England, as has been shown above, began long before his appointment to an official post. He fulfilled the obligations of the Laureateship as conscientiously as Tennyson, more ably than Austin, and more generously than Bridges. Masefield's activities in behalf of the theater, the speaking of verse, and other arts were many; in his person the Poet Laureate changed from the incumbent of a nominal office to "a living symbol of the power and authority" of poetry. (p. 230)

The Englishness of Masefield's work is the heart of it. If the prose and poetry that are characteristically and openly English are separated from the rest of his work, little of major importance remains. The greater body of Masefield's work, and the finest part of it, is that in which he dedicates himself to the portrayal and the interpretation of English landscape and life. In this England of Masefield, John Bull sometimes makes an appearance, but always he is countered by St. George. And the spirit of St. George shines brightest in those longer poems and tales which are most likely to live—The Everlasting Mercy, Dauber, "August, 1914," Gallipoli, Reynard the Fox, King Cole, and the Midsummer Night stories.

There is no inconsistency in Masefield's apparent shift from a consecration to the common man to a consecration to England. His England is the England of the common man; and the beauties of that England of the future for which he calls repeatedly in his later work are dedicated to the refreshment and the recreation of the common man in England and throughout the world. The new English theater for which he hopes in one of his later essays is but one of the agents Masefield invokes for the moving of "the world with the glory of the English spirit that is now the one thing left to us." (pp. 230-31)

Fraser Drew, in his John Masefield's England: A Study of the National Themes in His Work (© 1973 by Associated University Presses, Inc.), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.