[Christopher ONeill]

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.

[John Riley]

Pardon the interruption but the Lou Reed line is "They're driving gypsy cabs but they're thinking like a truck." Although "gypsy caravan" is an interesting association it's an urban song. I have fond memories of both John Masefield and Lou Reed from my youth but one of them has stuck with me more than the other.

[Bill Carpenter]

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.

[Janice D. Soderling]

"I must down to the sea again,"

That's how I quote it too, when I resort to memory. I remember very well lying awake in landlocked darkness no more than ten or twelve and quoting this to myself while listening to the distant train whistle; determined to grow up to be a hobo or sailor. That was before I learned about gender advantgages.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi all

It's the music of the repetition in the poem that makes it work. It's very much like Poe's "Annabel Lee" or "The Raven" or else Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" in utilizing a song-like structure to hook the reader (or the listener). This isn't going to work for everyone, and I suggest that is why some modern poets find the piece lacking. Yes it's old fashioned but it's effective, and it it is, needless to say, masterful.

Best regards

Chris

[Christopher ONeill]

Originally Posted by John Riley

Pardon the interruption but the Lou Reed line is "They're driving gypsy cabs but they're thinking like a truck."

Thanks for the heads-up.

I wouldn't have known the expression 'gypsy cab' when I first heard 'Trouble with the Classicists': it isn't the local idiom.

But I must have retained my original misconstruction of the line even after I became familiar with 'gypsy cab' as a term.

I shall miss my mondegreen, but I suppose one needs to stay true to the words of a poem.

[ChrisGeorge]

Originally Posted by Christopher ONeill

Thanks for the heads-up.

I wouldn't have known the expression 'gypsy cab' when I first heard 'Trouble with the Classicists': it isn't the local idiom.

But I must have retained my original misconstruction of the line even after I became familiar with 'gypsy cab' as a term.

I shall miss my mondegreen, but I suppose one needs to stay true to the words of a poem.

Hi Christopher

"Gypsy cabs" are well known in New York and other cities. They are unlicensed cabs that take business away from regular cabbies.

Chris

[Marcia Karp]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

It wasn't until rather recently that I realized John Masefield died in the 60s. I had thought he was from the 19th century or possibly earlier.

Masefield is reported to have said: “It was long since decided that I am like the dodo and the great auk, no longer known as a bird at all”

[Patrick Foley]

I'll give a defense. I think it is a good poem and I for one have no sentimental attachment to it.

1. The diction (and syntax and so on) are plain--that is, immediately understandable--but slightly elevated. That matters because:

2. It meets Yeats's criterion--something someone might actually say under the pressure of some great emotion.

3. I also think the emotion driving the speaker is far more universal than the literal meaning of going to sea. It's a poem you can turn to when you what you want most of all is to escape the everyday grind. The call of the open road.

4. There's also a catalog effect here: all I need is this and this and this. There's a sense that the life the speaker longs for is simpler, clearer, a life where everything has a prescribed place and purpose. I can't imagine anyone not feeling a desire for that now & then.

I can't quite decide from reading it whether Masefield knows anything at all about the sea, but that only adds to the sense that this is mostly daydream or longing.

So: emotions of strong universal appeal, speech elevated to a believable pitch, a memorable phrase or two and otherwise competent verisifying, and you get the sort of memorable poem people actually care about.

Pat

[Bill Carpenter]

Masefield spent his teen years on ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masefield