LOLLINGDON DOWNS
AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Uniform with this Volume
DAUBER
THE DAFFODIL FIELDS
PHILIP THE KING
THE FAITHFUL (A PLAY)
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1917.
TO
MY WIFE
So I have known this life,
These beads of coloured days,
This self the string.
What is this thing?
Not beauty, no; not greed,
O, not indeed;
Not all, though much;
Its colour is not such.
It has no eyes to see,
It has no ears;
It is a red hour's war
Followed by tears.
It is an hour of time,
An hour of road,
Flesh is its goad;
Yet, in the sorrowing lands,
Women and men take hands.
O earth, give us the corn,
Come rain, come sun;
We men who have been born
Have tasks undone.
Out of this earth
Comes the thing birth,
The thing unguessed, unwon.
O wretched man, that for a little mile
Crawls beneath heaven for his brother's blood,
Whose days the planets number with their style,
To whom all earth is slave, all living, food!
O withering man, within whose folded shell
Lies yet the seed, the spirit's quickening corn,
That Time and Sun will change out of the cell
Into green meadows, in the world unborn!
If Beauty be a dream, do but resolve
And fire shall come, that in the stubborn clay
Works to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,
The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way:
Beauty herself, within whose blossoming Spring
Even wretched man shall clap his hands and sing.
Out of the special cell's most special sense
Came the suggestion when the light was sweet;
All skill, all beauty, all magnificence,
Are hints so caught, man's glimpse of the complete.
And, though the body rots, that sense survives;
Being of life's own essence, it endures
(Fruit of the spirit's tillage in men's lives)
Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures.
That is our friend, who, when the iron brain
Assails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides,
Is the good God to whom none calls in vain,
Man's Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides:
The man-made God, that man in happy breath
Makes in despite of Time and dusty Death.
You are the link which binds us each to each.
Passion, or too much thought, alone can end
Beauty, the ghost, the spirit's common speech,
Which man's red longing left us for our friend.
Even in the blinding war I have known this,
That flesh is but the carrier of a ghost
Who, through his longing, touches that which is
Even as the sailor knows the foreign coast.
So by the bedside of the dying black
I felt our uncouth souls subtly made one:
Forgiven, the meanness of each other's lack;
Forgiven, the