The resemblance between the austerely tender pathos of "The Daffodil Fields" and Wordsworth's "Michael" is a genuine resemblance honorable to the younger poet; and the pointing to the resemblance is not, I trust, an example of the critic's weak habit of referring one poet back to another. Mr. Quiller-Couch has said that "neither in the telling did, or could, 'Enoch Arden' come near the artistic truth of 'The Daffodil Fields'." Now, if one is to compare poets, for the sake of praising them or for the better understanding of them, it is well to make comparisons that refer the new and unknown to the known in illuminating conjunction. To say that "Enoch Arden" does not approach the artistic truth of "The Daffodil Fields" is to make an inept comparison, to associate the weak with the strong, even though the comparison is negative. "Enoch Arden" is the flimsiest kind of romantic fraud in Tennyson's worst manner. It is a sob poem that sends only the tiniest lace handkerchiefs to the laundry. "The Daffodil Fields," for all its conscious artistry and the adroit manipulation of the verses, is terrifically sincere. If its substance has any allegiance to another English poet, we must look for a poet who had a realistic sense of the furrowed field and a visionary sense of the stars, that is Wordsworth. And if one's odious liking for comparison is not satisfied with that, one may ask readers of poetry to compare the opening stanza of "The Widow in the Bye Street" with Chaucer, and think of such merits as plainness of phrase, simplicity and ease of narrative, and soundness of verse structure.
Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
Is there not here a note that suggests the opening of "The Nonne Preestes Tale," even though the story which follows is quite unlike Chaucer's? Or is it only the "widow" that makes me associate the two? At any rate it is pleasant to think that Mr. Masefield in a strong, not an imitative or servile, sense, is heir to the oldest master of English narrative verse.
Then if our habit of judging new poets by old ones still dominates us, let us take any passage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it beside any of the thousand years of English sea poetry.
Denser it grew, until the ship was lost.
The elemental hid her: she was merged
In mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost,