John Masefield was a poet who had certainly seen another side of life than high academe and the experiences of being the pre-eminent poet of the land as Poet Laureate. As an orphaned teenager at the age of thirteen he was placed on the school-ship H.M.S. Conway… what he ‘suffered’ on board caused a nervous breakdown and by the age of seventeen he was in America, doing casual work where he could get it during a time of widespread depression. He was a bar tender and then worked in a carpet factory in Yonkers. He returned to Briatin when he was nineteen to work in a bank, and at the age of twenty-one he pursued a career in journalism.
Flesh, I have knocked at many a dusty door,
Gone down full many a windy midnight lane,
Probed in old walls and felt along the floor,
Pressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane.
But useless all, though sometimes, when the moon
Was full in heaven and the sea was full,
Along my body’s alleys came a tune
Played in the tavern by the Beautiful.
Then for an instant I have felt at point
To find and seize her, whosoe’er she be,
Whether some saint whose glory does not anoint
Those whom she loves, or but a part of me,
Or something that the things not understood
Make for their uses out of flesh and blood.
Lois Elsden 