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Updated: May 31, 2025
This wydwe, of which I telle yow my tale, Syn thilke day that she was last a wyf, In pacience ladde a ful symple lyf, For litel was hir catel and hir rente. Now if I could have only one of Mr. Masefield's books, I would take The Widow in the Bye Street. Its opening lines have the much-in-little so characteristic of Chaucer.
This poem, like most of Masefield's long narrative poems, is a story of human failure, a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in its pessimistic moods. A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield's short lyrics, notably in Laugh and be Merry, Roadways, The Seekers, and Being Her Friend. In Laugh and be Merry, the song is almost triumphant:
They love to dance in these fetters, and even when wearing the same fetters as another poet, they nevertheless invent movements of their own, so that Mr. Masefield's "Chaucerian" stanzas are really not so much Chaucer's as Masefield's. Each Ulysses makes and bends his own bow, after all; it is only the unsuccessful suitors for the honors of poetic craftsmanship who complain of its difficulties.
There is something essentially Christian and simple in Mr. Masefield's presentation of life. Conscious though he is of the pain of the world and aloof from the world though this consciousness sometimes makes him appear he is full of an extraordinary pity and brotherliness for men.
Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like the old dog in Masefield's "Reynard the Fox," Mr. Magnus would work through ditches full of legal slime, nose through thorn thickets of confusion, dash through copses and spinneys of words and phrases, until he snapped close at the heels of intelligibility.
Dauber, it will be seen, is more than an exciting story of a storm. It is a spiritual vision of life. It is a soul's confession. It is Mr. Masefield's De Profundis. It is a parable of trial a chant of the soul that has "emerged out of the iron time." It is a praise of life, not for its own sake, but for the spiritual mastery which its storms and dangers bring.
Masefield's sensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea. His is the witness less of a doer than of a sufferer. He is not a reveller in life: he is one, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides of anguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar of beauty or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the spiritual pain of the world.
"The days that make us happy make us wise." As Mr. Masefield's narratives take us back to Chaucer, so his Sonnets take us back to the great Elizabethan sequences. Whether or not Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his sonnets is impossible to determine. Wordsworth thought he did, Browning thought quite otherwise.
Masefield's works and Miss Olive Schreiner's, but I had not often found him communicative till that last night before reaching home. 'I'm better where I am earning a sure living, he went on. 'I've got a boy put to school at Southampton; no, not mine I'm not married. But he's staying at school a long while. I don't particularly want him to go out to South Africa, speaking for myself.
Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy and his series of realistic poems of the same order have been lavishly eulogised in exactly the same way and for a similar reason. Each of these poems contains a rousing story; each subserves the purpose of an excellent moral. They are realistic enough, but only in rare passages are they beautiful.
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