QUIET AND SHY

Taranaki Daily News, 24 July 1930, Page 6

QUIET AND SHY

MASE lELD THE MAN . ’’ Linger of the seas. ■ HOME AT BOAR'S HILL. A slender, bare-headed figure skipped down a path at the roadside, dropped a letter into a red pillar-box, and ran back to disappear within his vine-hung gateway: Even with only a back view to go on, nobody could possibly mistake him as he hurried through the driving cherry-blossom petals into the shelter of the doorway. Anyone would have recognised him as the 17-year-old English lad who worked as handy man at Luke O’Connor’s Columbia bar,thir-ty-five years ago, and who to-day has just been made Poet Laureate of England, the successor to Spenser, Ben Jonson, Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, says a writer in the New York Times. A stray New Yorker followed him to the doorway at the same hurrying pace, for dark clouds were racing overhead, the cherry-blossom petals were coining down in gusts like driven snow, and the last shaft of disappearing sunshine made the domes and spires of Oxford a gleaming red strip miles away at the foot of Boar’s Hill. In a moment tlic rain came. with a roar, but the New Yorker was then safely indoors, sitting before a lively grate fire, and noting that John Masefield at 52 has the same English schoolboy complexion he had at 17, the same unabashed, infectious happiness at the supreme honour of English poetry which has just befallen him. “MR.” MASEFIELD. It was the happiness of a man notoriously shy who suddenly finds himself caught by the limelight of brilliance to which he is wholly unaccustomed. One of the most distinguished English ■ poets, now officially the national poet, a man whom both Oxford and Cambridge have honoured with doctorates,, he is the kind of man one addresses, as Mr., Masefield because of the instinctive feeling that it would be distasteful to him to use the more formal 'address of Dr. Masefield. Who could have dreamed of addressing that almost legendary man, Robert Bridges, the late poet laureate, in . any style less august than Dr. Bridges? His vast ierudition, his many attainments, his striking - personal appearance as he strode; among his ■ carnations or looked angi'ily i down on the distant spires of Oxford, or played little unforgotten tunes upon his clavichord, make him the Idst of the great Victorians, a man content to "become legendary within his jwh lifetime. To Masefield belongs none of this

magnificent ■ remoteness, The only remoteness he has sought has been that prompted by his shyness. Throughout his long; literary apprenticeship he sang the hungers of ordinary men. In those days his verse shocked at times, but the world was then more innocent than it is now. In his tower work-room at Boar’s Hill he is still attracted by themes reminiscent of his own penniless early days. A SEA STORY. “I’ve just finished a sea story, ‘The Wanderer of Liverpool,’ ” he said. “The sea still attracts me.” “The poet laureate of the sea?” Ho smiled in his shy way. “I’ve never stopped to think what themes I most enjoy. I’m afraid I dismiss my work from my mind completely as soon :is it is done. I sometimes go back to some book I wrote years ago and look into it and. think to myself, ‘Bid I write that?-* I’ve half-a-dozen ideas in mind now,-but which I’ll work on next i really haven’t thought. One lets an idea form : for years, and when it is ready •. to ■ fee written it floats to the top and •• waits? there. For the most part I shall/ always write in verse. Verse is-'so -much jollier than prose. Jne gets' so ' much more fun out of. words.” . ‘The Wanderer of Liverpool,’ sounds autobiographical.” “In a 'way, perhaps it is. I went n for an officer’s ticket in the training ih.’p Conway at Liverpool when I was 13. I-might have got my ticket if I lad continued, but- there seemed to be ;o much more in life than navigation.” “You served under sail?”’ ' . ' “Oh, yes, all training ship boys did. 3ut I finally went'ashore in New York, with, I suppose, the same hopes 'of arger opportunities that most Englishnon have when in New York and began '

looking for work in Fleet Street.” To-day, at 5'2, Luke O’Connor’s handy man succeeds to the supreme post in contemporary English literature. CLASSICISTS. Ilis predecessors have been men of severely classical training. ' Masefield’s only association with the university has been his view of Oxford’s spires from his window on Boar’s Hill. Yet essential scholarship pervades the work of this shy, sensitive poet. He has sometimes chosen themes remote from established poetic tradition. He did so in “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street,” and “Dauber,” but in all these he showed that true poetic quality can transcend setting. In “Reynard the Fox,” a poem which already is a classic, he proved himself a master of vivid, rapid narrative. Among the very foremost living English poets, he has another title to fame ' in his play, “The Trial of Jesus,” perI formed in Canterbury Cathedral itself. ! Among the largest of all publics he has i won a place with his famous ‘‘l Must Go Down to the Sea Again.” This, i John Ireland set to music, and it is sung all over the world. Through this variety of subjects one finds him keenly English, ranging a wide field of English themes—-the sea, tox hunting, English countryside—themes which stir the English most deeply. Indeed, it is Masefield’s achievement that he has brought poetry to the ordinary man as his severely classical predecessor, trained to Latin and Greek in the quietude of an Oxford College, could not have done. Where is there a richer, more magnificent description of a sailing ship rounding Cape Horn than in “Dauber,” or a more moving description of that other ancient English passion, hunting, than in “Reynard the Fox” or “The Sawbucke?” There is something as racy as Chaucer in these pieces. Hunting men whose reading has been confined to Surtees have found themselves converted to poetry on the strength of Masefield’s superb description of the hounds alone. .STOLE INTO VIEW. How differently Kipling and Masefield arrived. Kipling came with the beating of drums and the blare of trumpets, Masefield stole upon ua, he emerged slowly ..from the obscurity of Fleet Street, The earliest Fleet Street story of him comes from’’ the Daily News'office. He went there soon after his return from New York in 1897 to ask for work. They gave him a book to review. Delivering his review the next day he ishyly asked whether it could be paid ' for then and there. “All right,” they said, “what’s your name?” “John Masefield,” he told them. That was, the first time his name had ever been heard in Fleet street. Sea pieces in the “Manchester Guardian and more book reviews in the London Daily News began making his name less unfamiliar. Young though he was in years he was already old in knowledge of the world, He had revelled in its dangers, seen much of its squalors. There was a spaciousness of earth and sky in what he wrote and . fierce contacts of elemental humanity. Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and thc mirth The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth— Mine be the dirt and the dross, The dust and the scum of the earth. Thus he consecrated his genius in his first book of sea ballads. It is possible he has not entirely adhered to this youthful confession of faith.