Piping Down

Everyone knows Ben Jonson, Tennyson and Wordsworth, but who ever heard of Nahum Tate, Laurence Eusden, and William Whitehead? All six men share the dignity of having been poets laureate of England, a tradition that goes back 350 years. According to the 17th and most recent laureate, John Masefield, this high post "is responsible for some of the world's worst literature." Masefield died last week at 88 at the country home in Abingdon where he spent most of his time. Fortunately, he had written much of his best poetry long before George V named him laureate in 1930 (in preference to his chief rival, Rudyard Kipling). Already safe from obscurity, Masefield thus turned out only occasionally the dutiful doggerel that has so often been the lot of poets laureate.

"Boozing Brutes." The son of a country lawyer, Masefield wrote roistering early verses peppered with adventures that he had packed into his teens. He went to sea as a cook, rose to the rank of master mariner, and sailed around Cape Horn. He went to the U.S., where he crossed the continent as a hobo, worked in a Greenwich Village saloon and, while employed in a Yonkers, N.Y., carpet factory, finally realized that his metier was poetry. Thus the rough, unschooled youth of 19 set out to fashion his poems not for "the portly presence of potentates goodly in girth" but for the "dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth." Such a taste was bound to shock the fastidious Edwardians, who were still doting on Tennyson. Shock them Masefield did with such long narrative poems as The Everlasting Mercy, which spoke of "painted whores" and "reeking hags" and "drunken, poaching, boozing brutes."

Masefield's pungent realism burst upon English poetry, but his worship of the sea was traditional for a maritime nation and his charming pastorals were long echoes of a yeoman past. His most famous short poem, Sea-Fever, was published with his first collection in 1902 and froze the seaman's world for ever in rolling, hypnotic meter:

I must go 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.

Masefield, unlike his contemporaries, was also not loath to describe the unromantic side of British life. At a time when more traditional poets were writing idylls about Britain, he could write, for example:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.

Out of Fashion. Despite the lusty tone of much of his verse, Masefield was a gentle, mild-mannered man who thought of himself as primarily a storyteller. He was a craftsman who turned out some 70 books, including 28 of poetry, 14 novels and the rest biographies, histories and comparatively undistinguished plays. The bestialities of World War I made the romance and optimism of his work go out of fashion, for that era brought the onslaught of symbolism, Freudian introspection, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Masefield thought of his laureate role as "a happy duty," though such eminences as Dame Edith Sitwell called his official paeans "dead as mutton." One penned to mark a trip abroad by Queen Elizabeth:

Even as April's footsteps that unseen

Touch upon March's earth and make it green

So be the Africk visit of our Queen.

Masefield led English poetry out of its Victorian sententiousness and thus earned his modest place in the poets' pantheon. In one of his last books, he wrote: "It is time now to pipe down and coil up."

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