‘I Must Go Down to the Seas Again’: The Poet Laureate of Saltwater and Sail

A rough voyage to Chili left John Masefield violently ill and, upon arrival at port, he was declared a DBS, "distressed British seaman." (Oliver Denker/Shutterstock)

Throughout his long life, John Edward Masefield (1878–1967) wrote a shelf full of novels, stories, essays, plays, and histories. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography acclaimed his “Gallipoli” as “one of the finest accounts we have of modern warfare,” and two of his books for the younger set, “The Midnight Folk” and “The Box of Delights,” remain in print and are considered classics of children’s literature.

But while he lived, Masefield won his highest accolades for his poetry.

Though he went through long fallow periods where he turned away from composing verse, he nonetheless produced an enormous number of sonnets, narratives, and other poetical works. His “Poems: Complete Edition” ran to over 1,100 pages. From 1930 until his death, he served as Britain’s Poet Laureate, holding tenure at that post second only to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Although he wrote novels, essays, and histories, John Masefield won his highest accolades for his poetry. Glass negative of Masefield photographed between circa 1910 and 1920. (Public Domain)

After his death, his ashes were interred in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where poet Robert Graves in his eulogy praised Masefield’s literary powers and described the man as “generous, courageous, unassuming, oversensitive.”

‘Sea-Fever’

Though he was orphaned as a boy, Masefield came of age reasonably happy in the home of an aunt and uncle, even as they tried to break him of what they viewed as an addiction to reading. After a stint of training for the merchant marine in Liverpool, the teenager set off for Chile on a sailing ship, the Gilcruix.

This rough voyage and his own ill-health left Masefield violently sick, and on arrival at port, authorities declared him a DBS, or “distressed British seaman.” Sent back to Britain, he embarked on another voyage, but then jumped ship in New York City and lived until 1897 as a wanderer and a worker of odd jobs before returning again to England, this time to seek his fortune as a writer.

As a teenager, poet John Masefield set off for Chile on a sailing ship, the Gilcruix. (Ryan Fletcher/Shutterstock)

Given Masefield’s uneasy relationship with the Atlantic, it is perhaps ironic that he first attracted attention as a writer of sea ballads and poems, the genre for which even today he is best remembered. “The sea is not subject to his genius,” Joyce Kilmer wrote of him. “It speaks through him.”

Perhaps the best known of all his poems, in fact, is “Sea-Fever,” published in 1902 in “Salt-Water Ballads,” Masefield’s first collection of verse.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

In these 12 lines we find many of the elements that mark the best of Masefield’s writing: the beauties of nature, which captivated him throughout his life; the “vagrant gypsy life,” a frequent topic in other poems; and that “merry yarn,” of which he was always a fan.

He was a romantic at heart, and this poem is a call to adventure and travel. His wonderfully sharp images like “the wheel’s kick,” “the white sail’s shaking,” and “the flung spray” do, as the poem suggests in its first line, take us down to the sea.

Romancing the Past

A second poem about the sea, one also frequently included in anthologies, is “Cargoes.” Unlike “Sea-Fever,” the focus here is on goods carried aboard ships, from the “quinquireme of Nineveh” to the “dirty British coaster.”

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amythysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig-lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

In the first two stanzas, Masefield paints the ships, the goods they carry, and the lands to which they travel with exotic colors. A quinquireme, for example, is an ancient Greek or Roman galley with five banks of oars on each side, and moidores are Portuguese gold coins.

In his poem "Cargoes," Masefield paints the ships, the goods they carry, and the lands to which they travel with exotic colors. (Enrique Alaez Perez/Shutterstock)

These sailing ships and their riches stand in sharp contrast to the coaster, slang for a coastal trading vessel, with its coal, lead, and “cheap tin trays.” Here there are no “sunny Palestine” and “palm-green shores,” but only the English Channel in March. It seems clear that Masefield’s romantic view of the past is again at work, contrasting the glories of sail and the riches of the past with the steam stacks and mundane goods of the present.

Unread but Not Unremembered

Cover of "Salt Water Poems and Ballads," 1916, by John Masefield. (Public Domain)

According to Britain’s Royal Collection Trust, by the time of his death John Masefield’s “Collected Poems” had sold over 200,000 copies, an astonishing figure for a book of verse in that or any time. His narrative poems like “The Everlasting Mercy,” “Dauber,” and “Reynard the Fox” gained him many readers, as did his frequent recourse to nature and the sea, two subjects long dear to the hearts of the English.

In spite of this enormous popularity and output, most of Masefield’s poems gather dust these days. His myriad of lines with their rhyme and cadence stands on the other side of the river from modernity’s penchant for free verse. Some of his subjects—the vagabond life, the rural poor—and his use of dated slang and vernacular have also lost favor in our modern era.

On my bookshelves, for example, are two textbooks suitable for advanced high school or university literature classes: X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s “Literature” and “Prentice Hall Literature: The English Tradition.” The former contains a brief study of “Cargoes,” while the latter, somewhat astonishingly given its focus on British writers, makes no mention whatsoever of John Masefield. No, with the exception of literary scholars and some traditionalists, Masefield’s poems, like those of so many other poets both then and now, attract little interest in our age of screens and electronic entertainment.

And yet, Masefield’s salutes to the sea reproduced above do remain popular, at least as far as poetry goes these days, and if nothing else, many students of literature will come across these verses of the sea. Ask a poet nowadays if he would be happy to know that after a century some lines he had written were still finding readers, and you can bet the bank that he’d answer with a delighted “Of course!”

A Word to the Wise

In his personal life, John Masefield celebrated and relished in the simple joys of living. Portrait of Masefield taken in 1916. (Public Domain)

Perhaps the treasures that Masefield valued most have also fallen out of favor. Though he lived well into the 20th century, his sensibilities in many ways remained Victorian, not only in his writing but also in his personal life. He treasured his wife, his helpmate for 56 years, and their two children, and preferred the open fields and woodlands of the countryside to the brick and stone of the city streets.

He also celebrated the simple joys of living and delighted, like so many poets, in the ordinary: a sunrise, laughter among friends, the burr and hustle of nature’s creatures in a field on a spring day.

In his poem “Biography,” Masefield begins:

When I am buried, all my thoughts and acts Will be reduced to lists of dates and facts, And long before this wandering flesh is rotten The dates which made me will be all forgotten ...

The narrator then spends the rest of this long, and sometimes tangled, poem ruminating on all that he has done and witnessed: the voyages made, the streets he has walked, the people he has encountered. “What life is is much to very few,” he observes, commenting on our blindness to so many of the mysteries and beauty of the world.

But in the final stanza, the observer states a truth often forgotten:

Best trust the happy moments. What they gave Makes man less fearful of the certain grave, And gives his work compassion and new eyes. The days that make us happy make us wise.

“The days that make us happy make us wise.” We don’t often connect joy with wisdom, but there’s a line we might engrave in our hearts and minds.