Masefield’s Poem of Conversion

It has not been the fashion in recent years for poets to be tellers of tales. The experimenters with the poetic art have broken words and thoughts into twisted fragments and symbols, often grotesque and cryptic, perhaps in order to simulate the vast confusion of our time. The gift of poetic song has almost passed from us. But in all generations there have been some bards who have been constrained to tell in memorable cadence their tales of high adventure, of noble triumphs of the human spirit or of tragic loss.

One of that ageless breed of poets is John Masefield, since 1930 poet laureate of England. Probably his name will always be associated chiefly with ships and the men who go down to the sea in ships, but his poetry covers a wide range of human experience on the good green earth of England as well as on the rolling deep.

It was natural that in the beginning he should have drawn his poetry from the sea he loved and from the lives of the common men he knew. Born in Herefordshire in 1878 and orphaned early in childhood, he was brought up by an aunt. At thirteen he began to prepare for the merchant marine service aboard the training ship “Conway.” Two years later he was in the service, sailing before the mast, a sensitive and artistic boy among hardened seamen. The record of his experiences at sea he wove eventually into a long narrative poem, Dauber, which is the finest account in English poetry of the lovely grace of sailing ships, of the beauty and terror of the sea, and of the courage and cruelty and inarticulate pity of seamen.

Here in the tale of a young artist tormented by callous sailors and overwhelmed by the sea’s violence, and again in such a tragic story as The Widow in the Bye Street, Masefield demonstrates his profound compassion for human suffering. He has heard “the still sad music of humanity” and voiced its aching aspirations and its dumb and pitiful bewilderment.

Oppressed by the limitations of life at sea, he left his ship in New York and did odd jobs in the city for a time until he secured employment in a carpet factory in Yonkers up the Hudson. While working there, he first read Chaucer with eager delight and decided to become a poet. It was a fortunate decision for English poetry, for there is something of Chaucer’s earthy tang in his work and much of his love for people, and a similarly faithful delineation of a great variety of characters.

Christianity At A Distance

But of all his many narrative poems, one of the earliest is likely to survive longest. When he wrote in 1911 The Everlasting Mercy, a poem about the conversion of a tough and godless fighter, he produced the finest poem on the rebirth of a soul in English poetry. Although Masefield is not essentially a religious poet, and although he can hardly be considered a Christian poet in the orthodox sense of the term, yet in The Everlasting Mercy he caught perfectly the psychology and the experience of Christian conversion. Here realistic dialogue, graphic description, swift and tense action all combine to make a narrative of great power and beauty.

When the story opens, Saul Kane (the name is doubly significant) has double-crossed his poaching friend and has challenged him to fight out their disagreement. When the appointed hour arrives, he longs to confess his fault and put it right, but pride and concern for what his backers would think prevent him. The story is narrated by Saul himself, and the simple power of natural speech heightens the dramatic intensity of the tale.

The grueling bout itself is narrated with bloody and brutal realism all the way to the eighteenth round, when Kane finally wins because Bill’s previously sprained thumb is out again and his whole hand has become a swollen lump of pain. Kane’s backers then escort him to “The Lion” for drinks, and there—

From three long hours of gin and smokes

And two girls’ breath and fifteen blokes,

A warmish night, and windows shut,

The room stank like a fox’s gut.

Kane opens the window and hears the clock strike three; a cock crows somewhere, and he begins to think, “If this life’s all, the beasts are better.” There is a moment of self-loathing and of despair. He thinks—

For parson chaps are mad, supposin’

A chap can change the road he’s chosen.

And he considers throwing himself down and ending it all. But a madness seizes him to go out and tell the whole sanctimonious, hypocritical town what he thinks of them. Out into the sleeping village he goes, ringing the fire bell and racing about like a demon out of hell. He wakes up the whole place with his wild carousal, but eventually escapes his pursuers and creeps back to “The Lion,” where he sleeps through the morning.

When he goes out in the afternoon again, reinforced by food and more liquor, he meets the parson and tells him what he thinks of the Church. Into this diatribe Masefield has worked a serious challenge against the social injustices which the Church has permitted to continue, but he also puts an effective counter-challenge into the cleric’s reply:

You think the church an outworn fetter;

Kane, keep it till you’ve built a better …

Then, as to whether true or sham

That book of Christ, whose priest I am;

The Bible is a lie, say you,

Where do you stand, suppose it true?

Goodbye. But if you’ve more to say

My doors are open night and day.

Meanwhile, my friend, ’twould be no sin

To mix more water in your gin.

But this reaction only increases Kane’s madness and his desire to show his contempt for church and priest. He moves on, but the girl with whom he had made a date stands him up, further increasing his rage. Later he discovers a little fellow crying outside a store window where his mother had left him. Kane shows him sympathy and tells him a story, but the mother coming out berates Kane as—

The lowest sot, the drunkenest liar,

The dirtiest dog in all the shire.

It is a cruel tirade, and yet something of her charge carries the first arrow of conviction into his heart.

But this old mother made me see

The harm I done by being me.

Being both strong and given to sin

I ’tracted weaker vessels in.

So back to bar to get more drink,

I didn’t dare begin to think.

And there, back at the pub, Masefield creates one of the most tensely dramatic scenes in English poetry. A saintly Miss Bourne, one of the Society of Friends, has a custom of making the rounds of the pubs to speak to the drunkards, and no one of them ever gives her a dirty word. But this night when she comes to “The Lion,” Kane greets her sneeringly and calls on the boys to join him in a bawdy song. “Miss Bourne’ll play the music score,” he says.

The men stood dumb as cattle are,

They grinned but thought I’d gone too far;

There come a hush and no one break it,

They wondered how Miss Bourne would take it.

She up to me with black eyes wide,

She looked as though her spirit cried;

She took my tumbler from the bar

Beside where all the matches are

And poured it out upon the floor dust,

Among the fag-ends, spit, and saw-dust.

“Saul Kane,” she said, “when next you drink,

Do me the gentleness to think

That every drop of drink accursed

Makes Christ within you die of thirst,

That every dirty word you say

Is one more flint upon His way,

Another thorn about His head,

Another mock by where He tread,

Another nail, another cross.

All that you are is that Christ’s loss.”

The clock run down and struck a chime

And Mrs. Si said, “Closing time.”

The wet was pelting on the pane

And something broke inside my brain …

And for a long silent minute they confront each other.

Miss Bourne stood still and I stood still,

And “Tick. Slow. Tick. Slow.” went the clock.

Finally she says, “He waits until you knock.” (Masefield must have meant “until you open,” for the traditional imagery and other references in the poem require it.) Then she goes swiftly out. Kane considers a drink-drop rolling to the floor and has the consciousness of “someone waiting to come in.” And the great surrender is made and the miracle happens. He goes out into the night, into the wind and the rain.

I did not think, I did not strive,

The deep peace burnt my me alive;

The bolted door had broken in,

I knew that I had done with sin.

I knew that Christ had given me birth

To brother all the souls on earth.

And as he walks through the darkness, his eyes are opened.

O glory of the lighted mind.

How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.

The station brook, to my new eyes,

Was babbling out of Paradise.

The waters rushing from the rain

Were singing Christ has risen again.

He walks until the dawn comes, and all earthly things that blessed morning become symbols of truth to his newly opened sight.

Then he hears the jingling of a team and sees old Callow at his autumn plowing, sees him working with God to cultivate the stubborn clay. And then he recognizes that he too must devote himself to some useful work. His new life demands a new creative expression.

I knew that Christ was there with Callow

That Christ was standing there with me,

That Christ had taught me what to be,

That I should plough and as I ploughed

My Savior Christ would sing aloud,

And as I drove the clods apart

Christ would be ploughing in my heart.

And with the boundless joy of the reborn soul, he jumps the ditch and takes the hales from farmer Callow.

An Enduring Religious Poem

This is certainly one of the great and enduring religious poems of our century, and it embodies the central message of hope that runs throughout Masefield’s poetry. He has closed his eyes to nothing that is low and mean and sordid in life, but neither has he failed (as some of the materialistic writers of our time seem to have failed) to see the beauty and the glory that are also possible within our human lot. He is one of those whom he describes in his poem “The Seekers,” ever seeking the City of God, for him the unattainable Ideal, “the haunt where beauty dwells.” In “The Ending” he says, “Go forth to seek.… The skyline is a promise, not a bound.” But he does not have the assurance of faith. He can only hope that there is life beyond. Yet in his hope there is the spirit of the glad adventurer.

Perhaps the nearest approach he makes to the great affirmations of the Christian faith is found in his poem “A Masque of Liverpool”:

And know that He who walkt upon the waves

Will befriend sailors, and at Death and Wreck

Stand by them ever with the Hand that saves

Even as the roller thunders on the deck,

And guide both ship and sailor to the blue

Bay of more peace than any living knew.

One of the most prolific of poets, Masefield has probably written too much. But out of the great harvest of his life Time will winnow the chaff, and there will be much of the precious grain of beauty and wonder to feed the minds and hearts of men in years to come.

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