_The Story of a Round House and other Poems_,
by JOHN MASEFIELD (Macmillan)
Not long ago I chanced to see upon a well-known page, reflective and
sincere, these words: "The invisible root out of which the poetry
deepest in and dearest to humanity grows is Friendship."
A recent volume may well serve as a distinguished illustration of the
saying's truth. Few persons, I think, will read _The Story of a Round
House and other Poems_ without a sense that the invisible root of its
deep poetry is that fine power which Whitman called Friendship, the
genius of sympathetic imagination.
This is the force that knits the sinews of the chief, the life-size
figure of the book. _Dauber_ is the tale of a man and his work. It is
the story of an artist in the making. The heroic struggles of an English
farmer's son of twenty-one to become a painter of ships and the ocean,
form the drama of the poem. The scene is a voyage around the Horn, the
ship-board and round-house of a clipper where Dauber spends cruel,
grinding months of effort to become an able seaman on the road of his
further purpose--
Of beating thought into the perfect line.
His fall from the yard-arm toward the close of the conquered horrors of
his testing voyage; the catastrophe of his death after
He had emerged out of the iron time
And knew that he could compass his life's scheme--
these make the end of the tragedy.
Tragedy? Yes. But a tragedy of the same temper as that of the great
Dane, where the pursuit of a mortal soul's intention is more, far more,
than his mortality. Unseen forever by the world, part of its unheard
melodies, are all the lines and colors of the Dauber's dreaming. At
Elsinore rules Fortinbras, the foe: the fight is lost; the fighter has
been slain. These are great issues, hard, unjust and wrong. But the
greatest issue of all is that men should be made of the stuff of
magnificence. You close the poem, you listen to the last speech of its
deep sea-music, thinking: Here is death, the real death we all must die;
here is futility, and who knows what we all are here for? But here is
glory.
Only less powerful than the impression of the strain of Dauber's
endeavor, is the impression of its loneliness. The sneers of the
reefers, their practical jokes, the dulness, the arrogance, the smugness
and endless misunderstanding, the meanness of man on the apprentice
journey, has a keener tooth than the storm-wind.
The verities of _Dauber_ are built out of veracities. The reader must
face the hardship of labor at sea. He must face the squalors, the
miseries. If he cannot find poetry in a presentment of the cruel,
dizzying reality of a sailor's night on a yard-arm in the icy gale off
Cape Horn, then he will not perhaps feel in the poem the uncompromising
raciness inherent in romances that are true. For the whole manner of
this sea-piece is that of bold, free-hand drawing of things as they are.
Its final event presents a genuinely epic subject from our contemporary
history--the catastrophic character of common labor, and one of its
multitudinous fatalities.
Epic rather than lyric, the verse of _Dauber_ has an admirable and
refreshing variety in its movement. It speaks the high, wild cry of an
eagle:
--the eagle's song
Screamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.
It speaks thick-crowding discomforts on the mast with a slapping, frozen
sail:
His sheath-knife flashed,
His numb hand hacked with it to clear the strips;
The flying ice was salt upon his lips.
The ice was caking on his oil-skins; cold
Struck to his marrow, beat upon him strong,
The chill palsied his blood, it made him old;
The frosty scatter of death was being flung.