A hungry dog, a miser, hidden treasure, digging for gold, death, a glint of gold… these little scenes are drawn in a mere handful of words by the master of imagery, John Masefield.
He is writing once again about beauty and about desire, but the pictures he creates for us within the fourteen lines of a sonnet are of little stories with character, plot, place, pace… he is a master indeed!
Each greedy self, by consecrating lust,
Desire pricking into sacrifice,
Adds, in his way, some glory to the dust,
Brings, to the light, some haze of Paradise,
Hungers and thirsts for beauty; like the hound
Snaps it, to eat alone; in secret keeps
His miser’s patch of consecrated ground
Where beauty’s coins are dug down to the deeps.
So when disturbing death digs up our lives,
Some little gleam among the broken soil
May witness for us as the shovel rives
The dirty heap of all our tiny toil;
Some gleam of you may make the digger hold,
Touched for an instant with the thought of gold.
Lois Elsden 