REVIEWS AND COMMENTS
The Story of a Round House and other Poems,
by John Masefield (Macmillan)
Not long ago I chanced to see upon a well-known page, reflective and sincere, these words: "The invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in and dearest to humanity grows is Friendship."
A recent volume may well serve as a distinguished illustration of the saying's truth. Few persons, I think, will read The Story of a Round House and other Poems without a sense that the invisible root of its deep poetry is that fine power which Whitman called Friendship, the genius of sympathetic imagination.
This is the force that knits the sinews of the chief, the life-size figure of the book. Dauber is the tale of a man and his work. It is the story of an artist in the making. The heroic struggles of an English farmer's son of twenty-one to become a painter of ships and the ocean, form the drama of the poem. The scene is a voyage around the Horn, the ship-board and round-house of a clipper where Dauber spends cruel, grinding months of effort to become an able seaman on the road of his further purpose—
Of beating thought into the perfect line.
His fall from the yard-arm toward the close of the conquered horrors of his testing voyage; the catastrophe of his death after
He had emerged out of the iron time And knew that he could compass his life's scheme—