The Haunted Gate

Just fourteen lines, and yet this sonnet by John Masefield offers  so many images and pictures, micro-synopses of gripping tales. ‘That broken hedge’ – broken here  conjures more than damage to a line of bushes or shrubs, and then calling it the haunted gate, just makes it even more creepy – and this is just the first line. Ghostly fires burning at dark moon, crimes and mysteries and heinous activities and the suggestion of murder ‘that bloodied clay’ lead us to buried treasure and on to the story of the Roman coins piled on rusty trays and the frightened man who buried them.

They called that broken hedge The Haunted Gate.
Strange fires (they said) burnt there at moonless times
Evil was there, men never went there late,
The darkness there was quick with threatened crimes.
And then one digging in that bloodied clay
Found, but a foot below, a rotted chest.
Coins of the Romans, tray on rusted tray,
Hurriedly heaped there by a digger prest.
So that one knew how, centuries before,
Some Roman flying from the sack by night,
Digging in terror there to hide his store,
Sweating his pick, by windy lantern light,
Had stamped his anguish on that place’s soul,
So that it knew and could rehearse the whole.