Even in "Consecration" we hear the challenging ring of a young voice
who has wandered over the face of the earth and has taken his place
with the "Outcast," has cast his lot with the sailor, the stoker, the
tramp.
"Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.
"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 the scum of the earth!
* * * * *
"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. Amen."
Salt Water Poems and Ballads.
And it is a most fascinating story to see him climb from his boyhood,
purely social, sympathetic interest in the outcast to that higher, that
highest social consciousness, vitalized with religion. Here, seems it
to me, that those who possess true social consciousness must come at
last if they do their most effective work for the social regeneration
of the world. Many have tremendous social consciousness, but no Christ.
Christ himself is the very pulse beat of the social regeneration.
Without him it must fail.
One feels, even here in his youth poems, however, a promise of that
deeper Masefield that later finds his soul in "The Everlasting Mercy."