"BALLADS AND POEMS."

Otago Witness, Issue 3278, 10 January 1917, Page 53

"BALLADS AND POEMS."

By Jessie Mackay

Most of us know something of John Masefield, the rhyming storyteller; John Masefield, the modern prophet, -whose " Everlasting Mercy " and " Dauber sound the deeps of ethic realism, even to 0 rebound of romantic taste, uninured to epics of the soul set amid squalour, vice, and ugliness. Such a Masefield we have met, and in preoccupied moments passed by till the "more convenient season" which such woeful addresses tend to elicit in excuse of poetic hearing denied. Another Masefield we meet here in these delightful fragments, these rounded cameos of a rich, full and finished art that is yet warm an dvibrant to the time. This yet warm and vibrant to the time. This any other season; no time so heavy, so weighted with affairs as to bar out these sea-salt rhymes of a beloved vagabondage : these magnetic love-songs, appealing and pure as the coo of birds; these fragrant verselets that aro steeped in the dewy meadow-bloom of English lanes and byways. Brief they aro and slender they are, but not in any particular the clanking rhymes of a set place or a set small outlook, such as fill ou'- wander-shelves and our temporary corners of reference. They are songs for all times, all places, all readers who have the " Open Sesame " into the garden of lyric delight. They are not the songs of immaturity, but they are in a sense holiday rhymes, the captured song-wafts of a spirit that has sounded the deeps and the altitudes, and still kept the boy's heart and the bird's heart through all. It is the old knightly mimic-singer's voice we hear in the " Ballad of Sir Bors," that Arthurian conception which flowered so richly and purely in Map and Mallory and Tennyson: "Would I could eee it, the rose, -when the light begins to fail, And a lone white star in the west is glimmering on the mail; The red, red passionate rose of the sacred blood of the Christ, In the shining chalice of God, the cup of the Holy Grail.

My horse is spavined and ribbed, and his bones come through his hide, My sword is rotten with rust, but I shako the reins and ride, For the bright white birds of God that nest in the rose have called, And never a township now is a town where I can bide.

It will happen at last, at dusk, as my horse limps down the fell, A star will glow like a note God strikes on a silver bell, ** And the bright white birds of God will carry my eoul to Christ, And the right of the rose, the rose, will pay for the years of hell. John Masefield has sought poetry daringly in the; slum, the pothouse, the verv garbage-heaps of civilisation. He found it there, and more—the very sheen of that vision of the Grail that drew Sir Bors to the far Avastes of the world. But he has also found it where other English singers have, in the bloomy hedge-rows, and on the daisied carpet of the woods and commons far away. It is a lovely song of the land of pixies and of green magic hollows, this exile . song of " The West Wind":

It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of bird's cries; I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes. For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills, And April's in the west wind, and daffodils.

It's a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine, Apple orchards blossom there, and the air"s like wine. There is cool green grass thero, where men may lie at rest, And the thrushes are in song there, fleeting from the nest.

"Will you not come home, brother? You have been long away, It's April, and blc-ssomtinio, and white is the spray; And bright is the eun, brother, and warm is the rain, , Will you not come home, brother, home to via again?

Larks arc singing in the west, brother, abovo the green wheat, So will you not come home, brother, and rest your tired foet? I've a balm for bruised hearts, brother, sleep for aching eyes," Says the warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries.

It's the white road westwards is the road I must tread To tho green grass, the cool grass, and rest for heart and head, To the violets and the brown brooks and the thrushes' song In tho fine land, tho west land, tho land where I belong.

This is a rover's book and a lover's book both, dedicated to a wife who is the star of an upward-rising life. One bright soul is invoked in the diverse moods of devout passion : Since I have learned love's shining alphabet, And spelled in ink what's writ in me in flame, And borne her sacred image richly set Hero in my heart to keep mo quit of shame; Since I have learned how wise and passing wiso Is tho dear friend whoso beauty I extol, And know how sweet a soul looks through the eyes, That aro so pure a window to her soul;

All I havo learned, and can learn, shows me this — How scant, how slight, my knowledge of her is. As pure a passion glows in tho poem "C. L. M.," the arrow-swift force of which proclaims John MasefieM one of the high troubadours that havo found the goal of all the bright and broken ways of oldtime chivalry—a modern of the moderns, a warrior of warriors: In tho dark womb whore I began My mother's life made mo a man.

Down in the darkness of the grave She cannot see tho life she gave. For all her love, sho cannot tell Whether I use it ill or well, Nor knock at dusty doors to find Her beauty dusty in tho mind. What have I done, or tried, or 6aid In thanks to that dear woman dead? Men. triumph over women still, Men trample women's rights at will, And man's lust roves the world untamed. 0 grave, keep shut lest I bo shamed. But the wander-joy is so strong in these pages that the man-soul finds its own there no less than the gentler gucster on the hearth. It is the Viking spirit that surges in this call from tho sea ; and, by the way, it is good that sailor men read their seapoets, since we find where "Bartimaeus," that popular ghost of to-day, found his "tall ships" : 1 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 tho eca's face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to tho seas again, to tho 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 a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when tho long trick's over. Better still is that "Prayer'' that fitly echoes the same wish that glows through the more leisurely wrought versecraft of Swinburne's "Ex Voto" : When the last fire is out and the last guest clex^arted Grant the last prayer that I shall pray, be good to me, O Lord.

And let me pass in a night at sea, a 'night of storm and thunder, In the loud crying of the wind through sail and rope and spar, Send me a ninth great peaceful wave to drown and roll mo under To the cold tunny-fish's home where the drowned galleons are. And in the dim green quiet place far out of sight and hearing, Grant I may hear at whiles the wash and thresh of the sea-foam About the fine keen bows of the stalely clippers steering Towards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home. What a quip of circumstance, with as much thought behind it as the reader chooses to fill in, is hit oft in "Cargoes" : Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir Eowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and r>eacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the tropics by the palmgreen shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack Butiing 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. The art that acclaims John Masefield in the front rank of living English poets, in the well-loved line of knightly Chaucer and classic Elizabethan is well shown in "Fragment*"—the old theme of the robber Sea stealing from the storied shores of the royal past: — Troy Town is covered up with weeds, The rabbits and the pismires broad On broken gold, and shards, and beads Where Priam's ancient palace stood.

And there in orts of blackened bone, The widowed Trojan beauties lie, And Simois babbles over stone And waps and gurgles to the sky. Once there were merry days in Troy, lies chimneys smoked with cooking meals, Tho passing chariots did annoy Tho sunning house wives at their wheels. So that, when Troy had greatly passed In one rod roaring fiery coal. The courts the Grecians overcast Became a city in the sold. In some green island of the sea, Where now the shadowy coral grows In pride and pomp and empery The courts of oid Atlantis rose. In many a glittering house of glass The Atlantoans wandered there; The paleness of their faces was Like ivory, so pale they were. And hushed they were, no noise of words In those bright cities ever rang; Only their thoughts, like golden birds, About their chambers thrilled and sang. The green and greedy seas have crowned The city's glittering walls and towers, Her sunken minarets are crowned With red and russet water-flowers. But at the falling of the tide, The golden birds still sing and gleam, Tho Atlanteans have not died, Immortal things still give us dream. It is good to find a philosophy that is full alike oi sun and sunwardness in these dark days. Such an anchored philosophy pulses through these line?, with which we may fitly conclude this talk on tho book of a lyric optimist who has sought his joy a 3 a royal spirit may, where deeds aro done and thoughts are thought in the testing-time of the cumulative ages: — Laugh and bo proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man. Laugh and ho merry: remember, in olden tirno, God mado heaven and earth for joy Ho took in a rhyme. Made them and filled them hill with the strong red wine of His mirth, The splendid joy of tho stars: the joy of the earth. So wo must laugh and drink from the deerj blue cup of the sky,

Join the jubilant eong of the groat stars sweeping by, Laugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured In tho dear green earth, the sign of the joy of tho Lord.