John Masefield had an almost spiritual appreciation of beauty, and had it from being a child, knocked almost breathless by a vision of natural loveliness. However, his imagination, and little what you might call micro-narratives, still creep into his work… ‘So beauty comes…’ a sonnet, has little scenes touched upon – an unanswered knock on a door, a fortune-teller reading the future in the sand, figures hidden by smoke, a wicked man and an honoured architect, the dawn chorus, the horse stamping reading to gallop away and the sleepy dog waking, a door being unbolted, a game of chess… these little scenes are played out in these short sonnets.
So beauty comes, so with a failing hand
She knocks and cries, and fails to make me hear,
She who tells futures in the falling sand
And still, by signs, makes hidden meanings clear;
She, who behind this many peopled smoke,
Moves in the light and struggles to direct,
Through the deaf ear and by the baffled stroke,
The wicked man, the honored architect.
Yet at a dawn before the birds begin,
In dreams, as the horse stamps and the hound stirs,
Sleep slips the bolt and beauty enters in
Crying aloud those hurried words of hers,
And I awake and, in the birded dawn,
Know her for Queen and own myself a pawn.
Lois Elsden 