Giant Hours with Poet Preachers

by William L. Stidger

2. Faith in Immortality

In "Rest Her Soul," these haunting lines with that expression of a deep faith found in "All that dies of her," we find a ray of light, which slants through a small window of the man that is to be:

"On the black velvet covering her eyes
Let the dull earth be thrown;
Her's is the mightier silence of the skies,
And long, quiet rest alone.
Over the pure, dark, wistful eyes of her,
O'er all the human, all that dies of her,
Gently let flowers be strown."

Salt Water Poems and Ballads.

But most of these ballads, as their title suggests, are nothing more than the very sea foam of which they speak, and whose tale they tell; as compared with that later, deeper verse of Christian hope and regeneration.

And then pass those ten years; ten years following the period of "The Salt Water Ballads"; and ten years following the time when he was a "bar-boy" in New York; ten years in which he climbs from a simple "social consciousness" to a social consciousness that has the heart beat of Christ in its every line. The poems he writes in this period are all of the Christ. "Good Friday," perhaps the strongest poem dealing with this great day in Christ's life, is full of a close knowledge of the spirit of the Man of Galilee. But it is in "The Everlasting Mercy" and not "The Story of a Round House" that we find Masefield at his big best, battering at the very doors of eternity with the fist of a giant and the tender love of a woman, and the plea of a penitent sinner.

Something had happened to Masefield in those ten years. A man's entire life had been revolutionized; and his poetry with it. He still feels the want and need of the world, and the social injustice; but he has found the cure. In a word, he has been converted. I do not care whether or no Masefield means to tell his own story in "The Everlasting Mercy," but I do know that he tells, in spite of himself, a story that fits curiously into, and marvelously explains, the strange revolution and change in his own life from "Salt Water Ballads" to "Good Friday."

II. CONVERSION

It is an old-fashioned Methodist conversion of which he tells, which links itself up with the New Testament gospel of the regeneration of a human soul in such a fascinating way that it gives those of us who preach this gospel an impelling, modern, dramatic putting of the old, old story, that will thrill our congregations and grip the hearts of men who know not the Christ.

1. Conviction of Sin