I think John Masefield would be amazed at ‘the tempting shops’ which are evidence of our consumer society; the way some people spend money these days, often so casually, and the way that those who are less well off are ‘lured’ would be beyond his imaginings!
However, this sonnet, published in 1916, is not really about shops and shopping, but about Beauty. Masefield’s feelings that of beauty was almost a real entity were overpowering for him and had been present since his earliest childhood; even as a very young boy he was overwhelmed at times by a sense of awe at the splendour of the natural world.
Memnon was an Ethiopian king at the time of the Trojan war and was killed by Achilles; a statue of him in Thebes was supposed to make a musical sound when the first light of dawn touched it
Though in life’s streets the tempting shops have lured,
Because all beauty, howsoever base,
Is vision of you, marred, I have endured
Tempted or fall’n, to look upon your face.
Now through the grinning death’s head in the paint,
Within the tavern-song, hid in the wine,
In many kinded man, emperor and saint,
I see you pass, you breath of the divine.
I see you pass, as centuries ago
The long dead men with passionate spirit saw,
O brother man, whom spirit habits so,
Through your red sorrows Beauty keeps her law,
Beauty herself, who takes your dying hand,
To leave through time the Memnon in the sand.
Lois Elsden 