The imagery and sentiment are admittedly formulaic, though perhaps with a unique, kinetic density of formulae. The stanza structure is almost geometric in its regularity (cf. Herbert's Vertue). But these predictable elements serve as a scaffold for the really extraordinary meter, which seems to defy categorization even into such broad classes as duple or triple meter. (Though I am eager to be enlightened on that score.) It seems to gain as much of its regularity from repeating its own idiosyncratic patterns, as from following familiar metrical or rhythmic patterns. So in this case the vox populi has chosen well. The handling of meter breathes fresh life into the formulae of sea-furniture and the popularized hunger of solitude, and gives the reader the pure pleasure of poetry.
I remembered the poem as "I must down to the sea again," so when I saw it again after long absence as "I must go down to the seas," I chalked up the missing "go" to defective memory. But then I saw in a note last night that when published in 1902 it began "I must down to the seas..." What a different metrical (and lexical) statement that makes! Gets the spondees going right from the start, and starts messing with the iambs, too. Interesting case of a poet revising his early inspiration.
Graves writes of Masefield sympathetically in Goodbye to All That. I greatly admire his journalism on WWI, recently collected in one volume. He was evidently the Dana Gioia of his era, too, an industrious servant of the art, organizing a very successful national poetry reciting competition.
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