I was 'encouraged' to learn a lot of relatively low-voltage poetry in junior school - Drinkwater, Abrecrombie, and Cullen Bryant figured large in school anthologies. Mostly it left me with a lifelong loathing of schoolpoetry. But I don't mind John Masefield's poems being escapist and anodyne. I think this is largely because of their combination of elegance and modesty.
The sea wasn't a major player in my childhood. Crossing the Bristol Channel to Ilfracombe was a regular holiday treat, but I knew that wasn't open water. I did like the way that this poem mixes iambs and anapests inside a larger repeating pattern: I thought it mimicked the way that choppiness assembles into a swell rather convincingly.
I also noticed while I was still quite young (though I wouldn't have been able to articulate the idea then) that this is different from poems like The Golden Vanity, or even Newbolt's Drake's Drum. Most sea shanties, and sea poems, talk about the sea as a highway - a means of going somewhere. This makes the sea a destination, right from the first line. Around the same time, Conrad's Marlowe was talking about the sea as a 'country' in Heart of Darkness. I think the notion of the sea as a place to be, not just on the way between places, makes this poem post-Victorian. The sea as terminus is also probably why the poem is so favoured for funerals, and incidentally prevents the poem from offering a 'life-lesson' (unless you genuinely do live at sea, I suppose). It helps this poem a lot that it isn't a homily.
I don't have the difficulty with the 'wind like a whetted knife' that some responders have shown. I wasn't public school myself, but I've rubbed up against enough public school boys to know that they often enjoy being flicked with damp towels. I'm a fan of comfort myself; but I can still hear the enthusiasm for spanking in The Hound of Heaven without disgust. Masefield's enthusiasm for gentle discipline here augments the poem's olde worlde charm.
I am nonplused by the 'tall ship' though. A tall ship is a very corporate enterprise: I can't get my head around the solo navigator air of the rest of the poem once there is a tall ship onscreen. It really should have been a sloop or a yawl to fit in with the rest of the poem.
I read it as a non-sailor's poem about the joys of sailing; and a non-gypsy's poem about the delights of a life on the road. I am always reminded of Sea Fever when I hear Lou Reed's line about 'Driving gypsy caravans and thinking like a truck'. Lou Reed is quite properly being dismissive of self-aggrandising pastoral. But there is a gentler side to derring-do daydreams, and I think that is where I enjoy this poem.
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