"O glory of the lighted mind.
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind!
The station brook to my new eyes
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing, 'Christ has risen again!'"
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
And then the soul glory:
"O glory of the lighted Soul.
The dawn came up on Bradlow Knoll,
The dawn with glittering on the grasses,
The dawn which pass and never passes."
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
But that wasn't all. Masefield knows that the other self must be
completely eradicated, so he makes Saul Kane change his environment
entirely. He goes to the country. He plows, and as he plows he learns
the lesson of the soil and cries:
"O Jesus, drive the coulter deep
To plow my living man from sleep."
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
And more word from Christ as he plowed:
"I knew that Christ was there with Callow,
That Christ was standing there with me,
That Christ had taught me what to be,
That I should plow and as I plowed
My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,
And as I drove the clods apart
Christ would be plowing in my heart,
Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,
Through all my bad life's rotten fruits."
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield
starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more
apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then
comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely
find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally
that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps
from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of
forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the
uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And
so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of
that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry,
pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes,
"Would make the dead arise!"