Revisiting John Masefield’s sonnets is always rewarding as something fresh and new always strikes me. Somehow this time i read this sonnet, it seems sad, that a better life comes only in dreams, and his fascination with Beauty, which as an abstract entity was with him from his very earliest childhood, never seems realised in a real woman, a friend or comrade, in company or solitude, in a place on land or sea. He was in his thirties when he wrote this had had many adventures and experiences, literally on land and on the sea, and the first World War was raging when he composed these poems. He was happily married with two children… the beauty he sought was nothing to do with romantic longings.
Even after all these years there comes the dream
Of lovelier life than this in some new earth,
In the full summer of that unearthly gleam
Which lights the spirit when the brain gives birth,
Of a perfected I, in happy hours,
Treading above the sea that trembles there,
A path through thickets of immortal flowers
That only grow where sorrows never were.
And, at a turn, of coming face to face
With Beauty’s self, that Beauty I have sought
In women’s hearts, in friends, in many a place,
In barren hours passed at grips with thought,
Beauty of woman, comrade, earth and sea,
Incarnate thought come face to face with me.
Lois Elsden 