[David Anthony]

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?

[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

[John Whitworth]

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

[Gail White]

This poem was one of my childhood favorites. I think Masefield is underrated today because he's not obscure enough for the fancy-pants critics. He wrote some splendid long narratives, such as "The Daffodil Fields."

[Patrick Foley]

Originally Posted by Bill Carpenter

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

Thanks, Bill. That's good to know. Taking the narrator as someone who really has been to sea helps.

A couple other things that occurred to me on the way to work:

What a different poem it would be without the ending--in contrast to the lonely sea mentioned at the beginning, we have the fellowship and camaraderie of the ending with the fellow rover. The world may be just as hostile at sea as not, but out there you don't face it alone, and maybe the narrator feels like he's facing his present land-bound troubles alone.

And then there's the sleep. Someone who's done good hard manual labor in the fresh air will miss the sound untroubled sleep such a lifestyle often brings with it. First time I read it, I almost wondered if that sleep wasn't what the narrator most wanted--you can just picture him older now, more sedentary, his life so much more complicated than it used to be, and unable to sleep, or at least not to sleep as he did when was younger and went to sea. He says he wants to go to sea, but what he wants is everything he remembers from that time in his life.

Also, it's hard not to hear "when the long trick's over" as the end of the narrator's life. So the narrator longs for his old life, longs for it at least one last time before he dies, longs to die with the sort of contentment he felt in earlier days. That's a pretty powerful feeling to me.

The more I read it, the more I like it, despite the signs of age. It feels like an honest and even a brave statement, said as well as he could say it.

*** I see now there were other posts while I was at work, and I seem to be repeating some of what David, Julie and Charlotte have said. Ah well...

On the word "trick"--I treated it as seaman slang I happen never to have heard, something like "hitch" for the military. I haven't checked to see if it's true. ("Trick" shows up in some odd job-related usages, as I'm sure we all know.)

Pat