From the age of about five, John Masefield had an intense and almost mystical appreciation of beauty and this is often reflected upon in his sonnets. He commented ‘all that I looked upon was beautiful, and known by me to be beautiful…’
Wherever beauty has been quick in clay
Some effluence of it lives, a spirit dwells
Beauty that death can never take away,
Mixed with the air that shakes the flower bells;
So that by waters where the apples fall,
Or in lone glens, or valleys full of flowers,
Or in the streets where bloody tidings call,
The haunting waits the mood that makes it ours.
Then at a turn, a word, an act, a thought,
Such difference comes, the spirit apprehends
That place’s glory, for where beauty fought
Under the veil the glory never ends,
But the still grass, the leaves, the trembling flower,
Keep, through dead time, that everlasting hour.
Lois Elsden 