Of Ships & Wonder

ON THE HILL (122 pp.)--John Masefield--Macmillan($1.50).

"The English poets," John Masefield once advised a reporter, "are not remote; they mingle with the crowd. They are not masters of men's brains, but companions of their hearts."

However badly his description may fit some of poetry's modern navel-contem-platers, Britain's Poet Laureate at least has remained true to his credo. From the day in 1902 when his first slim volume of Salt-Water Ballads rolled off a London press, John Masefield the poet has kept close companionship with the hearts of a generation of British and U.S. readers. In rhythms as forthright as the beat of a yeoman's pulse and lines as graceful as the curtsy of a tall East Indiaman in the wallow of a seaway, his verses have sung of the countrysides Britons love, of the sports and sportsmen dear to their hearts and of the gallant voyaging that is the stuff of their history.

When I am dust my penman may not

know

Those water-trampling ships which made me glow,

But think my wonder mad and jail to

find Their glory, even dimly, from my mind.

So wrote Masefield in his poem Biography (1912). Earlier in his life, when the formless urge to write had driven the young apprentice seaman from the sea he loved into a Yonkers, N.Y. carpet factory, Masefield had taken an even gloomier view. "It was most unlikely," he despaired, "that I should ever be able to write anything which anyone would print or pay me for."

Laureate v. Literature. Yet almost from the publication of his first work, Britain's readers, critics and publishers alike proved more than willing to pay in praise and coin for the privilege of sharing his wonder. In 1930, after the publication of more than half a hundred volumes of his poems, short stories, biographical and historical studies, novels and plays, King George V crowned the onetime sailorman's efforts with the well-meant accolade of the laureateship.

In middle age Masefield settled down to live the life of a country squire and poet emeritus on a hill overlooking Oxford. Famous poets and authors came to give readings of his works. University students bicycled up the slope to watch the plays he directed in a miniature theater built in his garden. Village neighbors thronged to his square-dance classes. When not busy with these enterprises, Masefield still kept busy writing. More than a dozen novels, including The Box of Delights (1935), Live and Kicking Ned (1939) and Bas-ilissa (1940), poured from his pen, but his great days as a poet were past. "The office of Poet Laureate," Masefield himself once admitted, "is responsible for much of the world's worst literature."

Older Ages. From On the Hill, the first volume of new Masefield poems to appear since the war, the laureate's publishers have mercifully excluded their author's dutiful little odes to George VI, Franklin Roosevelt, Princess Elizabeth and young Prince Charles of Edinburgh. The 24 poems that make up the volume are echoes of a sturdier Masefield who can still spin a tale of a country prizefight, drop a tear for the rifled tomb of an old king and enjoy the sense of friendly ghosts in Hilcote Manor. They are only echoes of the Masefield of Reynard the Fox, Enslaved and Dauber, but if they are unlikely to win the poet new admirers, they will still serve to keep the old ones mindful.

In the title poem of the collection, a compassionate allegory on the passing of Christ, an old, still proud but regretful Pontius Pilate tells a youth:

A young man follows flags that stream; In middle age he finds them dream. In older ages every zest Is but a habit sick for rest.

Since a serious case of pneumonia laid him low last April, 71-year-old John Masefield has been too ill to pursue even the gentle life he set himself at Oxford. It is unlikely that he will follow again in the future either the flags of his youth or the dreams of his middle age, but the zest that once stirred Masefield can still find counterpart in his readers even if theirs is also pretty much just habit.

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