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But followed me, as I went in,
And sank upon a chair;

And fixed her grey eyes on my face,
With still, unseeing stare.

And, as she waited patiently,

I could not bear to feel

Those still, grey eyes that followed me,
Those eyes that plucked the heart from me,
Those eyes that sucked the breath from me
And curdled the warm blood in me,
Those eyes that cut me to the bone,
And pierced my marrow like cold steel.

And so I rose, and sought a stone;
And cut it, smooth and square:

And, as I worked, she sat and watched,

Beside me, in her chair.

Night after night, by candlelight,

I cut her lover's name:

Night after night, so still and white,

And like a ghost she came;

And sat beside me in her chair;

And watched with eyes aflame.

She eyed each stroke;

And hardly stirred:

She never spoke

A single word:

And not a sound or murmur broke

The quiet, save the mallet-stroke.

With still eyes ever on my hands,

With eyes that seemed to burn my hands,
My wincing, overwearied hands,

She watched, with bloodless lips apart,
And silent, indrawn breath:

And every stroke my chisel cut,

Death cut still deeper in her heart:
The two of us were chiselling,
Together, I and death.

And when at length the job was done,
And I had laid the mallet by,

As if, at last, her peace were won,
She breathed his name; and, with a sigh,
Passed slowly hrough the open door:
And never crossed my threshold more.

Next night I laboured late, alone,
To cut her name upon the stone.

SIGHT 1

By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes
On colours ripe and rich for the heart's desire—
Tomatoes, redder than Krakatoa's fire,

1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1915, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre,

And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise.

And as I lingered, lost in divine delight,
My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight
And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . .
When suddenly, behind me in the night,
I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick.

John Masefield

...

John Masefield was born June 1, 1878, in Ledbury, Hertfordshire. He was the son of a lawyer but, being of a restless disposition, he took to the sea at an early age and became a wanderer for several years. At one time, in 1895, to be exact, he worked for a few months as a sort of third assistant barkeeper and dish-washer in Luke O'Connor's saloon, the Columbia Hotel, in New York City. The place is still there on the corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues.

The results of his wanderings showed in his early works, Salt-Water Ballads (1902), Ballads (1903), frank and often crude poems of sailors written in their own dialect, and A Mainsail Haul (1905), a collection of short nautical stories. In these books Masefield possibly overemphasized passion and brutality but, underneath the violence, he captured that highlycolored realism which is the poetry of life.

It was not until he published The Everlasting Mercy (1911) that he became famous. Followed quickly by those remarkable long narrative poems, The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), Dauber (1912), and The Daffodil Fields (1913), there is in all of these that peculiar blend of physical exulting and spiritual exaltation that is so striking, and so typical of Masefield. Their very rudeness is lifted to a plane of religious intensity. (See Preface.) Pictorially, Masefield is even more forceful. The finest moment in The Widow in the Bye Street is the por

trayal of the mother alone in her cottage; the public-house scene and the passage describing the birds following the plough are the most intense touches in The Everlasting Mercy. Nothing more vigorous and thrilling than the description of the storm at sea in Dauber has appeared in current literature.

The war, in which Masefield served with the Red Cross in France and on the Gallipoli peninsula (of which campaign he wrote a study for the government), softened his style; Good Friday and Other Poems (1916) is as restrained and dignified a collection as that of any of his contemporaries. Reynard the Fox (1919) is the best of his new manner with a return of the old vivacity.

Masefield has also written several novels of which Multitude and Solitude (1909) is the most outstanding; half a dozen plays, ranging from the classical solemnity of Pompey the Great to the hot and racy Tragedy of Nan; and one of the freshest, most creative critiques of Shakespeare (1911) in the last generation.

A CONSECRATION

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers

Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the

years,

Rather the scorned-the rejected-the men hemmed in with the spears;

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. The men with the broken heads and the blood running

into their eyes.

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the

road,

The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,

The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,

The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out.

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,

The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;— Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and 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.

SEA-FEVER

AMEN.

I must 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, And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

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