3. John Masefield (born 1874) has contributed much poetry to modern literature. Quite a budget of long descriptive-narrative poems has come from him, including The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), a grimly realistic tale; Dauber (1913), full of the splendor and terror of the sea; and Reynard the Fox (1920), a bustling tale of the foxhunt. These long poems are well informed and masterfully narrated, with many purple passages of description, and in the grimmer incidents a strong fidelity to fact that does not stop short of strong language. Mr. Masefield’s shorter poems, though they do not include any great lyrics, are dignified, reticent, and tuneful. He is undoubtedly at his best when he writes of the sea, a subject that was never far from the hearts of his great poetical predecessors.
4. William H. Davies was born at Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1870. In his youth he emigrated to America, where he became a tramp, and then served as a cattleman on a steamer. An accident in which he lost a foot made him incapable of hard physical work, so for a living he sang in the streets and lived in common lodging-houses. His first volume of verse, The Soul’s Destroyer (1906), rescued him from penury. His Collected Poems (1916) and Forty New Pieces (1918) contain his best work.
Like Burns, Mr. Davies is the natural, untaught lyrical genius. His capacity is neither so deep nor so intense as that of Burns, but within his limits he can write poems of great beauty. When he writes of nature he almost recreates the spirit of Wordsworth, he shows such insight, freshness, and ease. His artless simplicity is at times almost grotesque, yet the reader cannot help admitting that it is in keeping with his subject. This marked naïveté, however, is often given a queer metaphysical twist; or it sometimes rises, with a mighty rhythm, into passages of noble harmony. At least half a dozen of his shorter pieces—the expressive Thunderstorms; the exquisite Moon, so old in theme and so original in expression; the dainty Sweet Stay-at-Home, with its haunting Caroline meter and phrasing; the absolutely perfect The White Cascade, eight lines long; the provokingly beautiful Dreams of the Sea, that one cries out upon as being too wonderful to be merely imitative of the grand Marlowe manner; and the amazing verses, Elizabethan to the core, beginning When I Am Old—are stamped with immortality. The temptation to quote is irresistible:
(1) When I am old, and it is spring,
And joy leaps dancing, wild and free,
Clear out of every living thing,
While I command no ecstasy;
And to translate the songs of birds
Will be beyond my power in words:
*****