But followed me, as I went in, And fixed her grey eyes on my face, And, as she waited patiently, I could not bear to feel Those still, grey eyes that followed me, And so I rose, and sought a stone; 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, She watched, with bloodless lips apart, And every stroke my chisel cut, Death cut still deeper in her heart: And when at length the job was done, As if, at last, her peace were won, Next night I laboured late, alone, SIGHT 1 By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes 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, 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; 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. |