John Masefield

“ They go back to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind of maze, and as they take stock and count their strength there comes the roar of the Turkish war cry, the drum-like proclamation of the faith, and the Turks come at them with the bayonet. Then that lonely remnant of a platoon stands to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles like a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly song goes up, and the Turks fail to get home, but die or waver and retreat and are themselves charged as they turn. ”

“ After the hill with the cairn, he saw his landmark. There glittered the pool under the last of the sun. The little lonely island, not big enough for a peel, but big enough, years ago, for a lake-dwelling, shone out in a glimmer of withered grass. A few bents, bristling the shallows, bowed and bowed and bowed as the wind blew. A reef of black rocks glided out at the pool's end, like an eel swimming. Roger again had the fancy, which had risen in his mind before a dozen times, when passing the pool, that he would like to be a boy there, with a toy boat. ”

“ When I say two minutes, I do not tie myself to a second, but to two minutes, which the world knows to be a space of time. It was a space of time since the negro rode past. I am not one, as it is well known, like these giglots and inglesas and ayankiadas, whom one sees in Las Palomas, may the Lord have vengeance on them, shameless as they are, even as Jezebel, always painting and purple-powdering and making their eyes to shine with poison; I am not one, I say, like these, to spend my time in noticing each male who passes and in endeavouring to ensnare his soul. ”

“ You see horses and cars by the hundred thousand, and everything that is swift and strong and clever and destructive, suddenly important and desired and of great account. You see the toil of a nation suddenly intensified sevenfold, and made acute, and better paid than it ever was, and intellect, the searching intellect, that light of the mind which brings us out of the mud, suddenly sought for in the street. And you think, "Is man awaking suddenly to his heritage, and to the knowledge of what life may be here?" Then you say to yourself, "No, this is all due to the war." ”

“ YOU are more beautiful than women are,⁠
Wiser than men, stronger than ribbéd death,
Juster than Time, more constant than the star,
Dearer than love, more intimate than breath,
Having all art, all science, all control
Over the still unsmithied, even as Time
Cradles the generations of man's soul,
You are the light to guide, the way to climb.
So, having followed beauty, having bowed
To wisdom and to death, to law, to power,
I like a blind man stumble from the crowd
Into the darkness of a deeper hour,
Where in the lonely silence I may wait
The prayed-for gleam—your hand upon the gate. ”

“ Kubbadar pulling, romping first,
Like a big black fox that had made his burst.
And away and away and away they went,
A visible song of what life meant.
Living in houses, sleeping in bed,
Going to business, all seemed dead,
Dead as death to that rush in strife
Pulse for pulse with the heart of life.
"For to all," Charles thought, "when the blood beats high
Comes the glimpse of that which may not die;
When the world is stilled, when the wanting dwindles,
When the mind takes light and the spirit kindles,
One stands on a peak of this old earth." ”

“ To this day, I have only to singe a few hairs in a candle to bring back to my mind's eye that first day in camp at Axminster, the hill, the valley ringed in by combes, the noise of the horses, the sputtering of the fires of green wood, the many men passing about aimlessly, wondering at the ease of a soldier's life after the labour of spring ploughing. It was a wonderful sight, that first camp of ours; but the men for the most part grumbled at not fighting; they wanted to be pushing on, to seize the city of Bristol, instead of camping there. ”

“ But I am for the sugar-cane that in Jamaica grows;
For it’s that that makes the bonny drink to warm my copper nose,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
Oh some are fond of fiddles, and a song well sung,
And some are all for music for to lilt upon the tongue;
But mouths were made for tankards, and for sucking at the bung,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.
Oh some are fond of dancing, and some are fond of dice,
And some are all for red lips, and pretty lasses’ eyes;
But a right Jamaica puncheon is a finer prize
To the old bold mate of Henry Morgan. ”

“ After dark that night Margaret sat on the locker-top, looking at the wake, as it shone below him about the rudder. He was thinking over his manifold failure, feeling disgraced and stained, a defeated, broken man. Olivia entered quietly from the alleyway. He only felt her enter. There was no light in the cabin. The steward was busy with the wounded.
“Is that you, Olivia?” he asked, knowing that it was she. He felt in his heart the gladness which her presence always gave to him. Life could always be noble, he thought, with that beautiful woman in the world. ”

“ The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out.
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!
Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. ”

“ The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas.
Would I could see it, the rose, when the light begins to fail,
And a lone white star in the West is glimmering on the mail;
The red, red passionate rose of the sacred blood of the Christ,
In the shining chalice of God, the cup of the Holy Grail.
The dusk comes gathering grey, and the darkness dims the West,
The oxen low to the byre, and all bells ring to rest;
But I ride over the moors, for the dusk still bides and waits,
That brims my soul with the glow of the rose that ends the Quest. ”

“ Joy at the heart and Beauty at the springs.
One hour, or two, or three, in long years scattered
Sparks from a smithy that have fired a thatch,
Are all that life has given and all that mattered;
The rest, all heaving at a moveless latch.
For these, so many years of useless toil,
Despair, endeavour, and again despair,
Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil,
Idle delight to tempt one everywhere.
A life upon the cross. To make amends,
Three flaming memories that the deathbed ends.
There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brain
That flared three several times in seventy years. ”

“ It is one of the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the good in Helena is blind to the faults in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully, as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in doing evil because evil has been done to him. Hot blood is running in him. Temptation, never far from youth, is always near the unbalanced. ”

“ Aboard those ships are the English sailors, the finest men afloat, living cheerfully the lives they have chosen, under humane and just captains.
There is no London merchant telling over gold in his counting-house, no man-of-war’s man standing his watch at sea, who does not owe his gold or his rights to the men who lived wretched days long ago aboard old wooden battleships, under martinets. In order that they might live as they live, what misery, what blood and tears, fell to the portions of those who went before making straight the paths! ”

“ Not very long after that night, when I was sitting with a Danish sailor who was all broken on the wheel of his vices and not far from his death, I talked about the sea-spirits and their beauty and their wildness, feeling that such a haunted soul as my companion's would have room in its crannies for such wild birds. He told me much that was horrible about the ghosts who throng the seas. And it was he who gave me the old myth of the sea-gulls, telling me that the souls of old sailors follow the sea, in birds' bodies, till they have served their apprenticeship or purged their years of penitence. ”

“ The sea was not yet breaking with any violence upon the beach. It was white as far as the eye could see, as though the heads of every wave had been whipped off and flogged into foam which shone as though with moonlight from the phosphorescence. Washes of breaker burst and rushed up the sand to Sard’s feet, like washes of fire in which all the marvellous shells of which the beach was composed, were lit up like jewels. Far away to the right, out at sea on the edge of the sky, there was, as it were, a shaking wall of white from the sea already running upon the Rip-Raps. ”

“ He lived again in his past more intensely than he had ever lived. His life in Ireland, his days with Ottalie, her words and ways and looks, he realised again minutely with an exactness which was, perhaps, half imaginative. He troubled his peace with the sweetness of those visions. The more deeply true they were, the more strong their colour; the more intense the vibration of their speech, the more sharp was the knowledge of their unreality, the more bitter the longing for the reality. He was home-sick for the Irish hills which rose up in his mind so clearly, threaded by the flash of silver. ”

“ LOOK at the grass, sucked by the seed from dust,
Whose blood is the spring rain, whose food the sun,
Whose life the scythe takes ere the sorrels rust,
Whose stalk is chaff before the winter's done.
Even the grass its happy moment has
In May, when glistering buttercups make gold;
The exulting millions of the meadow-grass
Give out a green thanksgiving from the mould.
Even the blade that has not even a blossom
Creates a mind, its joy's persistent soul
Is a warm spirit on the old earth's bosom
When April's fire has dwindled to a coal ”

“ Crying "I told the truth, even unto death,
Though I was earth and now am only breath."
IF all be governed by the moving stars,
If passing planets bring events to be,
Searing the face of Time with bloody scars,
Drawing men's souls even as the moon the sea,
If as they pass they make a current pass
Across man's life and heap it to a tide,
We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass
Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside.
Is all this beauty that does inhabit heaven
Trail of a planet's fire? ”

“ With Margaret and Cammock away, and Perrin seldom present at meals, owing to his fear of the badgering of Stukeley, the cabin of the Broken Heart had come to be something of a home to her. She could feel again that nothing else really existed, that no one else really lived, that all the world, all the meaning and glory and life of the world, centred in the two burning mouths, in the two hearts which divined each other, apprehending all things in themselves. During that week of privacy she had even learned to think tenderly again of the three men who had shared the cabin with her. ”

“ Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood,
Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood.
Glimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir,
Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty's minister.
Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon,
A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.
Only a moment held, only an hour seen,
Only an instant known in all that life has been,
One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace,
The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.
Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives ”

“ Then if you go on, you come to a landscape where there is no visible living thing; nothing but a blasted bedevilled sea of mud, gouged into great holes and gashed into great trenches, and blown into immense pits, and all littered and heaped with broken iron, and broken leather, and rags and boots and jars and tins, and old barbed wire by the ton and unexploded shells and bombs by the hundred ton, and where there is no building and no road, and no tree and no grass, nothing but desolation and mud and death. ”

“ They were going upon a night attack in a country known to be a wilderness with neither water nor way in it. They had neither light nor guide, nor any exact knowledge of where the darkness would burst into a blaze from the Turk fire. Many armies have gone out into the darkness of a night adventure, but what army has gone out like this, from the hiding places on a beach to the heart of unknown hills, to wander up crags under fire, to storm a fortress in the dawn? Even in Manchuria, there were roads and the traces and the comforts of man. ”

“ And on the clipper rushed with tossing mast,
A bath of flame broke round her as she passed.
The watch was set, the night came, and the men
Hid from the moon in shadowed nooks to sleep,
Bunched like the dead; still, like the dead, as when
Plague in a city leaves none even to weep.
The ship's track brightened to a mile-broad sweep;
The mate there felt her pulse, and eyed the spars:
South-west by south she staggered under the stars.
Down in his bunk the Dauber lay awake
Thinking of his unfitness for the sea. ”

“ Hear the yarn of a sailor,
An old yarn learned at sea.
The wives and girls they watch in the rain
For a ship as won’t come home again.
‘I reckon it’s them head-winds,’ they say,
‘She’ll be home to-morrow, if not to-day.
I’ll just nip home ’n’ I’ll air the sheets
’N’ buy the fixins ’n’ cook the meats
As my man likes ’n’ as my man eats.’
So home they goes by the windy streets,
Thinking their men are homeward bound
With anchors hungry for English ground,
And the bloody fun of it is, they’re drowned!
Hear the yarn of a sailor,
An old yarn learned at sea. ”

“ Ice filled the air with spikes; the grey-backs burst.
"Here's Dauber," said the Mate, "on deck the first.
"Why, holy sailor, Dauber, you're a man!
I took you for a soldier. Up now, come!"
Up on the yards already they began
That battle with a gale which strikes men dumb.
The leaping topsail thundered like a drum.
The frozen snow beat in the face like shots.
The wind spun whipping wave-crests into clots.
So up upon the topsail yard again,
In the great tempest's fiercest hour, began
Probation to the Dauber's soul, of pain
Which crowds a century's torment in a span. ”

“ On this ocean side of the Sierra there was no desert. Instead of a chaos of rock blasted by the sun to rottenness, there were heaves of hill flinging their waters to the forests. Forests covered the valleys like a fleece. In places where there was no forest Sard could see little white houses. The smoke of a train ran like a caterpillar along the valley beneath the foothills. Beyond the foothills was a dark mass, like a bar of metal, yet not like a bar of metal, because it seemed to be alive, it gave Sard the thought that it trembled: it was the sea. ”

“ The sun arose greyly in mist, then burned the mist away, a spilling spring of light, in a sky like blue fire. Then in the glare of noon the chart was marked, the pencilled dot moved forward in its zigzag, past the Serranas, past Roncif, past the Roncadores. Then the wind came fair for a few days to help her to the south, her bows in a heap of smother. Presently, when the first land-wind came to them, in a faint breath, smelling, as they said, of arnotto roses, there came drifting butterflies, white and blue, very lovely, settling and dying on the deck, like petals from a fruit tree in spring. ”

“ He would be a supreme soul. He would dominate this rabble which hooted him.
He lit another cigarette. John was like a man sent from God. John was unreal. John had marched before him with a torch. Now that ghostly master of his had thrust the torch into the road, pointing him forward with a gesture. The way to perfection lay further on, along a path too narrow for two. Far up the path he could see Ottalie, a glimmer of fragrant beauty, half hidden in a whirling dust-storm which almost swept him off the ledge. The dust should not keep him from her. ”

“ On all the roads, on the plain, which lay white like salt in the glare, and on the sides of the gullies, strange, sunburned, half-naked men moved at their work with the bronze bodies of gods. Like Egyptians building a city they passed and repassed with boxes from the walls of stores built on the beach. Dust had toned their uniforms even with the land. Their half-nakedness made them more grand than clad men. Very few of them were less than beautiful; whole battalions were magnificent, the very flower of the world's men. ”

“ Dust-footed Time will never tell its hour,
Through dusty Time its rose will draw men on,
Through dusty Time its beauty will make plain
Man, and, Without, a spirit-scattering grain.
XIII.
Ah, but Without there is no spirit scattering;
Nothing but Life, most fertile but unwise,
Passing through change in the sun's heat and cloud's watering,
Pregnant with self, unlit by inner eyes.
There is no sower, nor seed for any tillage;
Nothing but the grey brain's pash, and the tense will,
And that poor fool of the Being's little village
Feeling for the truth in the little veins that thrill. ”

“ And nations are only great when they are true to that soul. Men can only be great when they are true to the best they have imagined. And I believe that in times of stress, in national danger, in calamity, the soul behind a nation kindles and quickens and is alive and enters into men, and the men of the nation get strength and power from it.
I believe that that great soul, made by the courage and beauty and wisdom of the millions of the race, is the god of the race, to protect it and guide it and to lead it into safety. ”

“ Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.
Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. ”

“ For the prize was bright Emmy; his blood beat and beat
As her beauty made music in that thunder of feet.
The wind was whirled past him, it hummed in his ears,
Right Royal's excitement had banished his fears,
For his leap was like singing, his stride was like cheers,
All his blood was in glory, all his soul was blown bare,
They were one, blood and purpose, they strode through the air.
"What is life if I lose her, what is death if I win?
At the end of this living the new lives begin.
Whatever life may be, whatever death is,
I am spirit eternal, I am this, I am this!" ”

“ That Beauty was brought near by my revolt;
Beauty was in the moonlight, in the dew,
But more within myself whose venturous tread
Walked the dark house where death ticks called the dead.
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. ”

“ From half-past five till midnight every section of the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by stink pots, and sticks of dynamite, by gas-bombs and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel, which only ceased to let some rush of Turks attack, with knives, grenades and bayonets, hand to hand and body to body in a blackness like the darkness of a mine. At midnight the wounded were lying all over the trenches, the enemy dead were so thick that our men had to walk on them, and bombs were falling in such numbers that every foot in those galleries was stuck with human flesh. No man slept that night. ”