Enslaved
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. 8vo, viii+129 pp. $2.50.
To do a thing of beauty, and to do it better than anybody else could do that particular thing, is the work of the true and achieving artist. Such an one Mr. Masefield proves himself again through the pages of this book. The poem from which it takes its title is one of his longer stories in verse, not so long as Dauber and Reynard the Fox, not so important as the first, not so uncompromising a chronicle as the second. It is a tale of Moorish pirates, of the capture and the rescue of a beautiful maiden, a tale of pure romance, in which the grim and the lovely are mingled with an even hand — and the hand is unmistakably the hand of Masefield. In the two long ballads that follow it, ‘The Hounds of Hell and ‘Cap on Head,’ he is even more effectively himself. In the simplest ballad measure, he tells two tales of those ancient days when the devil and his works were palpably revealed to human eyes, and tells them with all the directness and beauty of thought and word which give to genuine ballad literature the quality of belonging to no single period, but to time and life themselves. The stanza, in ‘The Hounds of Hell,’describing the flowers and the birds who gave the sore beset St. Withiel the spiritual strength to withstand the hounds and huntsman from whom he had twice fled, are stanzas of a beauty altogether memorable. In ‘Cap on Head’ the beauty is almost wholly grim, and its power is extraordinary.
These three poems go far to fill the volume. In one of the others, ‘On Growing Old,’ there are a few lines in which the whole spirit of Mr. Masefield, as the messenger of those essential things for which he speaks with so authentic an accent, finds expression: —
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.
Its fire and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.
Give me but these, and though the darkness close,
Even the night will blossom as the rose.
Even the night will blossom as the rose.
In these lines, too, the seeker for Masefield himself will find him: —
O, like the ghost at dawn, scared by the cock.
Let me make haste, to let the spirit, dive
Deep in self’s sea, until the deeps unlock
The depths and sunken gold of being alive
Let me make haste, to let the spirit, dive
Deep in self’s sea, until the deeps unlock
The depths and sunken gold of being alive
‘Till, though our Many pass, a Something stands
Aloft through Time that covers all with sands.
Aloft through Time that covers all with sands.
‘The depths and sunken gold of being alive there is indeed the hid treasure in which Mr. Masefield works with such zest and cunning that a book like this, containing a few poems that will stand among his best, bids us cease lamenting that our age is incapable of producing poets, for obviously it is not.
M. H.
In response to requests from many librarians, the reviews printed each month in this department of the magazine will be reprinted separately in pamphlet form. Copies may be had by any librarian, without charge, on application to the Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington St., Boston.