John Masefield/John Masefield's Place In English Poetry
Not until the publication of The Everlasting Mercy in the English Review in 1911 did the critics prick their ears. No volume of poetry published in this century has made a stir comparable to the effect it produced. From that day poetry took a new lease of life. At the risk of being accused of uttering blasphemy, let it be set down here that this was an event fully as decisive as the publication of Lyrical Ballads a century before. The Everlasting Mercy, whatever its defects, poured vitality back into English verse. Poetry was again the provoker of hot argument, not merely matter for languid appraisal.
That event, in reality only a few years past, now seems far off. Many new voices have since been raised, both in America and in England. Of them all, to this reviewer, Masefield's is the fullest-toned, the deepest. He has remained sensitive to the tradition of English poetry, but he has never been circumscribed by it. His foundations rest unshakably upon it, but he has done his own building. None knows better than himself how much he owes to the great singers who have preceded him; he does not pose as the beneficiary of a special dispensation. But what he has drawn from them he has made unmistakably his own.
One can think of no other poet since Chaucer so purely English in derivation and in spirit. His intense nationalism has no doubt contributed to the marking down of his talents in some critical quarters, for nationalism nowadays receives a cold scrutiny. Masefield's is of the kind that will not be stared down. Its basis is spiritual, in
. . . the heartfelt things past-speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men.
Out of that nationalism of his came the noblest utterance in poetry that the War brought forth. If Masefield had written nothing else besides "August, 1914," his name would be remembered among the English poets. No blustering patriot, no facile glorifier of war, wrote those lines. If men died for love of England they also
. . . died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands
For some idea but dimly understood
Of an English city never built by hands
Which love of England prompted and made good.
The mood in which Masefield watched the approach of war, as it is here recorded, is not the eager consecration to which young men like Rupert Brooke gave expression. Masefield's poem has lost nothing of its poignancy in the aftermath of disillusion, because it was written from an embracing vision. It does not ennoble war; it merely perceives it as the agency through which men reach down into
The depths and sunken gold of being alive.
Men will give of themselves again as they have before, to the last spurt of energy, to the last drop of blood.
In the idealism of which human nature is capable, whether in blindly serving unworthy ends or not, one finds John Masefield's sympathies always passionately enlisted. That is what gives meaning to his world.
The faithful fool who follows the torn flag,
The woman marching by the beaten man,
Make with their truth atonement for the brag,
And earn a pity for the too proud plan.
For in disaster, in the ruined will,
In the soiled shreds of what the brain conceived,
Something above the wreck is steady still,
Bright above all that cannot be retrieved.
Grandeur of soul, a touching of the star
That good days covered but by which we are.
That is the conviction, this burning belief in the tortured nobility to which human nature can reach, which is at the core of tragedy in his plays, just as it runs through the poems. Whether it be Pompey the Great, going to his death on the shores of Pelusium in Egypt, or the Samurai of The Faithful laying down their lives out of loyalty, the informing spirit is the same.
It is natural that a poet who is deeply sensitive to the potential greatness in human nature should seek ardently for some assurance that man is not playing his part in a meaningless rigmarole. His sequence of sonnets picturing the flow and ebb of vanishing civilizations ends with these lines:
So shall we be; so will our cities lie,
Unknown beneath the grasses of the Summer,
Walls without roofs, naves open to the sky,
Doors open to the wind, the only comer.
And men will grub the ruins, eyes will peer
Fingers will grope for pennies, brains will tire
To chronicle the skills we practiced here,
While still we breathed the wind and trod the mire.
O, like the ghost at dawn scared by the cock
Let us make haste, to let the spirit dive
Deep in self's sea, until the deeps unlock
The depths and sunken gold of being alive
Till, though our Many pass, a something stands
Aloft through Time that covers all with sands.
Is there another poet in whose work there is combined the fruitful meditation which distinguishes Masefield's sonnets and the impelling flow and graphic sharpness of his narrative verse? He is an extraordinarily versatile poet. Where else among living writers of verse can one find the ancient ballad form recreated as in "The Hounds of Hell" and "Cap on Head," with no loss of the original freshness and dramatic sweep? "Dauber" stands as the best poem of the sea and as one of the best stories of the sea in the English tongue. And he has served the countryside, as well, in Reynard the Fox, The Daffodil Fields and King Cole. All the life of an English county stirs in Reynard the Fox, and that man's blood is sluggish indeed who can put down the poem without reading through to the finish of the hunt. Here is narrative that flies.
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Among all his contemporaries in poetry there is none who has a better chance of survival. If he had been less intelligible, those who complain now of his intellectual content would be better satisfied, but he has chosen to stand with the best poets in his tongue in that also; his simplicity is of the sort that helps to keep poetry remembered and alive. The poetry that springs from emotion, not the intellectual exercise. In that conception of his art John Masefield has been unswerving: the beauty of ships that has moved him, the sea's power, the soul of man fighting in the last ditch—his emotional response to such as these has been finely tempered, of ringing honesty, and fired with the spark that brings a glow to the minds of other men.
—New York Times Book Review