Page:John Masefield.djvu/12

 of ships, the endurance of men." The poem tells of a painter whose heart's desire is to portray the sea as it really is.

A fall from the masthead kills him before he fulfills his mission. Masefield tells us that the poem is based on fact, and "Thinking of him after many years, he seems to me to be typical of the artist, who in every age will obey the laws of his being and speak his message, in spite of every disadvantage, and in contempt of death." This poem, his famous "Biography," and other favorite verses were published in the United States in the volume.

, his next long narrative poem, recounts a story of the tragic love of two men for the same woman. There are pages of particularly beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. "It always seems to me a most moving thing that natural beauty, the running water, the coming of the flowers of the spring, and the singing of birds should go on year after year with so little apparent change and with so little apparent passion while men change and do themselves such wrong in the same scene and subject to the same season," Masefield says, in speaking of the poem which so beautifully portrays the contrast of man's turbulent spirit with the serene beauty of nature.

came in 1914. The bringing of the news of the ruin of the Armada to King Philip II of Spain is the theme of the short play,. "It is one of the noblest expressions of refined patriotism in our literature, and along with 'The Wanderer,' 'Ships,' 'Biography,' it stands at the head of all the verse literature of the glory of ships." "August, 1914," that most memorable of war poems, is included in this volume.

In 1915, a three-act tragedy, appeared. It is based on episodes in Japanese history at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which have been brought together into