I have finished reading Constance Babington Smith’s biography of John Masefield, and although I struggled with the style and her way of writing, it is a masterful book and furnishes a great deal of information about John, or Jack or Jan as he was called by friends and family. He wrote his sonnets when he was still a young man, but a man who had endured and experienced much more than most. I knew he was orphaned when young, his mother dying after giving birth to his youngest sister, his father two years later probably from the grief which affected his health; I knew that John had been then given into the care of his uncle and his wife, but I didn’t know what a harsh and uncaring woman his Aunt Kate was.
I knew that he had been sent to a naval training ship but I didn’t realise that hard though it had been, he had in a way enjoyed it and certainly learned much, about himself as much as anything. Although I knew he had gone to sea, nothing I had read had given me insight into what he endured on the sailing ship he was on for months, going round Cape Horn.
The more I read about him, the more I admire him.
Sonnet
The other form of Living does not stir;
Where the seed chances there it roots and grows,
To suck what makes the lily or the fir
Out of the earth and from the air that blows.
Great power of Will that little thing the seed
Has, all alone in earth, to plan the tree,
And, though the mud oppresses, to succeed,
And put out branches where the birds may be.
Then the wind blows it, but the bending boughs
Exult like billows, and their million green
Drink the all-living sunlight in carouse,
Like dainty harts where forest wells are clean.
While it, the central plant, which looks o’er miles,
Draws milk from the earth’s breast, and sways, and smiles.
Lois Elsden 