He wrote a novel called 'Sard Harker' or something like that. I haven't read it but I think it's about sailing boats.

Interesting take, Christopher. Despite the poet's mention of the "lonely" sea (and the marked lack of mention of sordid sailors, sadistic officers, etc.), I've never had the impression of solo navigation.

To me, this poem is (as you mention in your final paragraph) a wistful daydream of freedom...but only a specific kind of freedom. It's not the freedom of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus"--with its defiant "I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul" celebrating the autonomy to set one's own course and accept the consequences.

Instead, I think this poem celebrates the seduction of leaving all one's terrestrial cares behind...trading them in for things over which one has no responsibility, such as birds and wind. It's freedom from the need to make important decisions, because you're not in charge. A pretty seductive siren, that, at times.

It's the seafaring equivalent of the daydream of running off to join the circus. The drudgery, squalor, financial insecurity, etc., of the reality are totally irrelevant to the fantasy.

This is what interests me here. The poem itself has so little merit we're forced to ask ourselves: "What's actually going on? Why would anyone defend such a piece?"

I ask myself a similar question whenever I drive the New Jersey Turnpike, and pass the Joyce Kilmer rest stop. I've never paused there, and yet many do. Why? And why is it that so many who pay so little attention to poetry immediately recognize "My little horse must think it queer / to stop without a pool hall near?"

Perhaps the answer is precisely what David suggests: there's so little content, and what's there is so vague, that the poem becomes a vessel for readers to pour their own lives into it. And since they naturally love their lives, they in turn love the poem.

Never mind that few of the poem's adherents would ever seek out 'the vagrant gypsy life,' or even consider having a single drink with an actual vagrant gypsy. If they saw one coming, they'd walk the other way. And yet they embrace the poem...

But that's beside the point. Maybe we're spending way too much time on vintning the wine. Perhaps we should be crafting wine vessels instead. I've never actually turned a pot, but I'm pretty sure I could rig up a wheel in my shop, and maybe even a backyard kiln! ;)

Thanks,

Bill

{ editing in: cross-posted with Julie. I like her answer better! }

To be fair to Masefield, the vagrant gypsy life appears to have been his when he was young. It often makes you very conservative indeed when you are older and to have a proper respect for money. Conrad was the same. Though, come to think of it, W.H. Davies was not.

Like so many of the finest sea poems and ballads, there's an analogy here between the ending of a voyage and the ending of life:

'And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over'

Who could hope for more than this?

David, I granted L2 is strong and that the final line suddenly delivers a metaphor at the last possible moment. But it seems to me that the metaphor comes too late, and is not really of a piece with the lines that come between L2 and the end. Just random details.

Also, I don't see what's so great about grey mists or grey dawns (and, by the way, what would a grey dawn that is not breaking look like? I suspect it would look like a dawn observed by a poet who didn't need to rhyme in that spot).

Just a minor (and tedious) setting the record straight -- as Bill notes, but I failed to see until writing this, the first line given is not from the volume given. (You might happily ignore the following textual criticism.)

In the 1902, and until the 1910 Ballads and Poems, the line is

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky

But of course, bibliography's goal being to drive us crazy, the 1st American edition of Salt-Water Poems and Ballads, 1916, returns to the no-go version. As do the 1st American edition of Salt Water Ballads and Poems (1923) and all four English editions (1923-1938) of Collected Poems. And then there is the erroneous single first sea, no-go,version in the Boston rag, The Living Age (1902).

Please, don't learn from JM how to title vols.

Marcia

This is brilliant:

there's so little content, and what's there is so vague, that the poem becomes a vessel for readers to pour their own lives into it.

That is how archetypes work in the soul/psyche.

Nemo

Sure this poem is so spare and simple-seeming that it could well be "a vessel for readers to pour their own lives into" (Bill), or an empty vessel, for that matter (me), or an "archetype" (Nemo), or an essence (me), or something pure and elemental (me).

Overall, there is in part some relief to be had in reading this poem, for that "freedom" from responsibilities and cares, that Julie talked about.

I don't find the poem tired, or worn, or whatever, at all. It makes me think of walking by the ocean here (LA). It's where you go to blow all the crap out of your head. And JM catches the essence of that beach freedom, and the longing for simplicity we all have at times.

And for me--I'm in agreement with David A--the final line wraps it all up beautifully:

"And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over."

The word "trick" is the most interesting in the poem. Wow! It's as if he were saying: yeah, I know, life's just all deception and delusion; we don't get our dreams at all; it's all a "trick." It's as if he's commenting rather wryly, or even acerbically, on his longings and dreams--on the entire poem, in fact. Yes, that one word makes a huge difference to how one reads the poem; impossible to see it as sentimental now.

See, he knows he's in cloud-land here by the waves. What is there, really, but looking forward to death as a "quiet sleep and a sweet dream" after life's complicated muck? The relief of that! Of course, he could also be talking about going home to an early night of good sleep after a nice day on the beach... but that "long trick"... No, I don't think so.

I think I read this when young, but I don’t really remember it from those days. And it doesn’t resonate with me in the way that a poem like Edward Thomas' "Adlestrop" does, for example. Now I see, after all, there's a whole lot more going on in Masefield's poem than I thought.

So nice to come to these old classics afresh!

Charlotte