We know no beauty

Another Masefield sonnet, another fourteen lines packed with imagery as well as the poet’s continued discourse on beauty. her ewe are in the ‘noisy sickroom’, with a whole little scene painted in eight lines, ‘some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves’. Once again royalty is mentioned, I have a sense that Mansfield imagined some distant mythical court, Arthurian maybe, and not the King and Queen he would have known, Victoria and then her son Edward VII.

If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense,
There be a wisdom piercing into brains,
Why should the glory wait on impotence,
Biding its time till blood is in the veins?
There is no beauty, but when thought is quick,
Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselves,
Some flattery comes to try to cheat the sick,
Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves,
And, for the rest, we play upon a scene
Beautiful with the blood of living things;
We move and speak and wonder and have been,
Upon the dust as dust, not queens and kings;
We know no beauty, nor does beauty care
For us, this dust, that men make everywhere.