With John Masefield’s sonnets, the more you read them the more there is to be read into them. I have read some criticism of his work in sonnet form, but I don’t share it. To me, he seems to speak across the hundred years since he wrote these words, and i can see truth in them now, as when he wrote them. He was deprived of his mother when he was only six when she died giving birth to his youngest sister; when he mentions women and children within a line, I wonder if he was thinking of her?
Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;
Something that uses and despises both,
That takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,
Then sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,
And flinging off youth’s happy promise, flies
Up to some breach, despising earthly things,
And, in contempt of hell and heaven, dies,
Rather than bear some yoke of priests or kings.
Our joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,
A woman’s beauty or a child’s delight,
The trembling blood when the discoverer scans
The sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite;
The ringing scene, the stone at point to blush
For unborn men to look at and say “Hush.”
Lois Elsden 