these were work in a bakery, a livery stable, along the water-front, and the widely celebrated term of a few months in a saloon near Jefferson Market.
A chance acquaintance with the owner of a carpet factory in Yonkers, New York, led to a position there, and the next two years were happy ones, as they gave security from want and time for reading. A book shop in the town was a favored haunt of his, and every Friday, which was pay day, he bought new books. In speaking of this period he has said, "I did not begin to read poetry with passion and system until 1896. I was living then in Yonkers, New York (at 8 Maple Street). Chaucer was the poet, and the Parliament of Fowls the poem of my conversion. I read the Parliament all through one Sunday afternoon, with the feeling that I had been kept out of my inheritance and had suddenly entered upon it, and had found it a new world of wonder and delight. I had never realized, until then, what poetry could be. After that Sunday afternoon I read many poets (Chaucer, Keats, Shelley, Milton, and Shakespeare, more than others) and wrote many imitations of them. About a year later, when I was living in London, I wrote two or three of the verses now printed in Salt Water Ballads."
Masefield's intimate association with sailors and longshoremen had given him a deep insight into their lives, and it was as their laureate that he began his career of letters. Salt Water Ballads opens with a "A Consecration," in which he announces himself as champion of "the dust and the scum of the earth."
"Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold,
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told."
Some of the poems in this book are now known the world over especially—"Cargoes" and the oft-quoted "Sea-Fever."
"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
