This sonnet by John Masefield conjures some very strange imagery… ‘the unseen friend, the unseen twin’… I can imagine that would make a good movie! The man who mistakes a palace for an inn, and then doesn’t even notice the ‘glorious garden’. The idea of chasing shades – and by this does he mean shadow or ghost or either or both? It is without doubt a religious poem,, and yet almost a hundred years after it was written, we can read it in a very different way.
Man has his unseen friend, his unseen twin,
His straitened spirit’s possibility,
The palace unexplored he thinks an inn,
The glorious garden which he wanders by.
It is beside us while we clutch at clay
To daub ourselves that we may never see.
Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay
We chase the shade but let the real be.
Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress,
We thrust on that unseen, get stature from it,
Cast to the devil’s challenge the man’s yes,
And stream our fiery hour like a comet,
And know for that fierce hour a friend behind,
With sword and shield, the second to the mind.
John Masefield
Lois Elsden 