Tag: John Masefield

On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Here’s another poem by John Masefield (1878–1967), Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.

It’s the sort of poem you can easily overlook and dismiss as a typical pastoral piece. Repeated readings, though, reveal some lovely sound effects and the feeling that the sunset symbolises something else.  

As with other Masefield poems that have a rural setting, it’s not clear where we are in time. I had assumed that it was written during the first world war and was a sort of coded reference to that conflict. I was surprised to find out that it was actually written earlier, around the time of the Boer war.

Is it actually the British Empire on which the sun is metaphorically setting? Or is it just a memorable image of a country sunset with words taking the place of paints?

Perhaps it has a more personal meaning because Eastnor is in Herefordshire, near Ledbury where Masefield was born and spent his early years.

On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

Silent are the woods, and the dim green boughs are
Hushed in the twilight: yonder, in the path through
The apple orchard, is a tired plough-boy
Calling the cows home.

A bright white star blinks, the pale moon rounds, but
Still the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset
Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on
The misty hill-tops.

Ghostly it grows, and darker, the burning
Fades into smoke, and now the gusty oaks are
A silent army of phantoms thronging
A land of shadows.

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive writing life. He was the Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death, but today he is perhaps best known for his children’s stories.

His own childhood, though was far from happy. Masefield’s mother died giving birth to his sister when he was six years old and his father died soon afterwards. He did not get on with the aunt he lived with and he attended a boarding school at which he was unhappy.

It was his aunt who decided he should pursue a career in the merchant navy and he was sent to a training ship at the age of thirteen. It was during his time there that he discovered his love of poetry and storytelling, setting him on the path to becoming a well-known writer. He was never really healthy enough for a maritime career and he left the sea, with his first book of poems published in 1902.

This poignant poem about his mother is from 1912 and is deeply personal, the attitude to birth and death reflecting his own sad experience and sense of guilt. The view of women expressed here feels quite ahead of its time.

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.

Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell
Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.

If the grave’s gates could be undone,
She would not know her little son,
I am so grown. If we should meet,
She would pass by me in the street,
Unless my soul’s face let her see
My sense of what she did for me.

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?
What woman’s happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth’s releasing hell was reached?

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

The Dead Knight by John Masefield

The Good Reader1 Comment

Here is another overlooked gem from John Masefield that I discovered not long ago. I can’t find an exact date for this poem. The anthology from which I took it was published in 1928, so it was written before then, at least.

I think the date is important because it could well have been written either during the first world war or in its long shadow. I wonder whether Masefield was inviting his original readers to think of the casualties of the western front. Can anyone out there shed any light on this for me?

The theme of the poem also bears some resemblance to the Scottish language ballad, The Twa Corbies, by our old friend anonymous. I can’t help feeling too, that it might have inspired the lyrics of the 1967 song Conquistador by Procul Harum. 

Perhaps it’s not the most original theme. Be that as it may, Masefield made a haunting, musical and memorable poem out of it.


The Dead Knight by John Masefield

The cleanly rush of the mountain air,
And the mumbling, grumbling humble-bees,
Are the only things that wander there,
The pitiful bones are laid at ease,
The grass has grown in his tangled hair,
And a rambling bramble binds his knees.

To shrieve his soul from the pangs of hell,
The only requiem-bells that rang
Were the hare-bell and the heather-bell.
Hushed he is with the holy spell
In the gentle hymn the wind sang,
And he lies quiet, and sleeps well.

He is bleached and blanched with the summer sun;
The misty rain and cold dew
Have altered him from the kingly one
(That his lady loved, and his men knew)
And dwindled him to a skeleton.

The vetches have twined about his bones,
The straggling ivy twists and creeps
In his eye-sockets; the nettle keeps
Vigil about him while he sleeps.
Over his body the wind moans
With a dreary tune throughout the day,
In a chorus wistful, eerie, thin
As the gull’s cry — as the cry in the bay
The mournful word the seas say
When tides are wandering out or in.

Up On The Downs by John Masefield

The Good Reader1 Comment

John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive career in both prose and poetry, but comparatively few of his works are well-known today. He was appointed poet laureate in 1930 when that was a job for life, so held the position for thirty-seven years. His Collected Poems is a hefty volume, yet it is only two short poems, “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”, that turn up in anthologies. I think there might be other gems waiting to be re-discovered. For example, I recently came across, almost by accident, “CLM”, a poignant poem about his mother, who died when Masefield was a small boy.

I suspect that Masefield has different readerships for different aspects of his work. For example, his 1937 children’s novel The Box of Delights has never been out print, almost having a cult following, helped perhaps by the 1984 BBC television adaptation. His 1917 description of the topography of the Somme battlefield, The Old Front Line, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and could be called the first battlefield guide. A theme that runs through much of his work is the sense of history in the landscape.

The poem below is another that I discovered through the BBC Radio 3 programme, Words and Music, in the edition entitled The Haunted Landscape. The format of this programme is that the titles of the pieces and their creators are not identified. You can get that information from the programme website. It works quite well if you listen to the programme, then go back and identify the things that made a particular impression on you.

I was amazed when I found out how old it is and who had written it. I had assumed it was by a more recent poet. It actually dates from the first world war period, when Masefield was living at  Lollingdon Farm in Berkshire. I had also rather lazily assumed that the human sacrifice in the 1972 film The Wicker Man was a scriptwriter’s invention. Whether it is an invention or not, the idea is clearly not as new as I thought.

Masefield was too old to be a fighting soldier but did see the western front both as a hospital orderly and later, as a journalist. I have seen it suggested that this poem can also be interpreted as referring to conditions on the battlefield. However one interpretates it, this is a powerful and atmospheric poem, collapsing the distance between past and present with something of the atmosphere of what is now known as folk horror.


Up On The Downs by John Masefield

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.