II
HIS PORTRAIT
A Man of Sorrows! with such haunted eyes,
I trow, the Master looked across the lake,—
Looked from the Judas-heart, so soon to make
Of Him the world’s historic sacrifice;
Moreover, as I gaze, do more arise;
Great souls, great pallid ghosts of pain, who wake
And wander yet; all, weary men who brake
Their hearts; all hemlock-drunk, with growing wise:
Hudson adrift; Defoe; the Wandering Jew;
Tannhauser; Faust; Andrea; phantoms, all,
In Masefield’s eyes you lodge; and to the wall
I turn you,—hand a-tremble,—lest you make
Of mine own stricken eyes a mirror, too.
Wherein the sad world’s sadder for your sake.
III
HIS “DAUBER”
O Masefield’s “Dauber!” You, who being dead,
Yet speak: heroic, dauntless, flaming soul,
Too suddenly snuffed out! Here take fresh toll
Of cognizance, and, in your ocean bed,
Serenely rest, assured that who has read
What you would fain have pictured of the Pole
Would gladly match your part against the whole
Of many a modern artist, Paris-bred.
And more than this: if you, indeed, are his,
Then, by a dual truth, he, too, is yours;
For, marked and credited by what endures,
Were it the only thing, which bears his name,
(O deathless Soul, I speak you true in this!)
“The Dauber” has brought Masefield to his fame.
IV
HIS “GALLIPOLI”
“Small wonder,” speaks my pensive self, “that he
Whose passion ’tis to sing of men who fail,—
(Belabored, broken by The Unseen Flail)
Small wonder that be makes Gallipoli
His fervent text, for could there be
A costlier failure in Earth’s shuddering tale?
Think of heroic Sulva’s bloody swale;
Of Anzac’s tortured thirst and agony!”
But as I read, protesting voices cry: “Not we,
Not we, who fell among the daffodils,
Who conquered Death among those blistered hills,
And found our glory after mortal pain;
Not we, who failed and lost Gallipoli;
The sad, strange failure theirs who mourn in vain!”