Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse. Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire. He was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea.
Some of the poets of the present day have used new words and phrases, but they are generally strange words, which no one thinks of using for himself. The poet John Masefield used the word waps and the phrase bee-loud, which is very expressive, but which we cannot imagine passing into ordinary speech.
Masefield knows how to supply them. Yet I am not sure that the self-denial of Enoch and the timid patience of Philip do not both indicate a certain strength absent in Mr. Masefield's wildly exciting tale. Of course Tennyson's trio are all "good" people, and he meant to make them so.
Masefield published The Everlasting Mercy in 1911; The Widow in the Bye Street in 1912; Dauber in 1912; The Daffodil Fields in 1913. We had him classified. He was a writer of sustained narrative, unscrupulous in the use of language, bursting with vitality, sacrificing anything and everything that stood in the way of his effect.
A little too much one of a class, perhaps: there's a strong family likeness, isn't there, between Cambridge undergraduates? But he was more cultivated than a good many of his class. We used to go up the river together and read what did one read in the spring of 1914? Masefield, I suppose, or was it Maeterlinck? Rupert Brooks came with the war.
It was an excellent discursus on the drama from the time of the morality plays to the time of the Irish Players, and it included references to Euripides, Ibsen, the Noh plays of Japan, Mr. Masefield; but John felt, when he had read it, that most of it had been written before its author had seen his play.
John Masefield wrote many novels and plays in which he showed singular fineness of feeling and beauty of style. But when he wrote a poem called The Everlasting Mercy a story of thrilling incident with an admirable moral lo! his popular reputation was made! People could understand a story of sensational incident. They could understand the moral.
Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread. I've known an engineer would give his head To know square sennit." As the Bose began, The Dauber felt promoted to a man. Mr. Masefield has generously provided six pages of glossary at the end of his poem, where we are told the meaning of "futtock-shrouds," "poop-break," "scuttlebutt," "mud-hooks," and other items in the jargon of the sea.
Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic episodes. These two poets illustrate a tendency to introduce a new realistic poetry.
And of all the poems published in the early days of the struggle, none equalled in high excellence August 1914, by John Masefield. And its tone was precisely the opposite of what his most famous efforts had led us to expect. It was not a lurid picture of wholesale murder, nor a bottle of vitriol thrown in the face of the Kaiser. After the thunder and the lightning, came the still small voice.
Word Of The Day