What is the attraction the sea holds over the imagination of man? It is vast, dangerous, filled with life, threatening death, far from man’s common life, ever in motion, prone to storm, the speediest way in old times to get from one port to another, impossible to cross without government and order, but never to be crossed without outbursts of merriment and song. Melville’s narrator “Ishmael” showed up in New Bedford as he said so many other American boys and men would do, because the voyage summoned them — even if, supposing you were going with the merchant marine, or on a whaling vessel, you would not see home again for two years at least. You’d never do it for profit alone. You might not do it for profit at all. You’d do it because it’s there to be done.
And that’s the spring for our Poem of the Week, which describes just that longing: “Sea-Fever,” by the British poet John Masefield, the title poem to his book by that name. We’ve got a habit of classing people by centuries — I know that I do, anyway — and yet there are all kinds of people like Masefield who grew up in the 19th century and then stayed around for a long time in the next. George Bernard Shaw was such; so was our good friend G. K. Chesterton; and so was Masefield, born in 1878, and so an inheritor of all that classical British education and of Victorian ways of looking at the world. But he died in 1967, right in the midst of campus protests and the widespread discarding of whatever remained of that kind of education he had benefited from.
Masefield is a traditional poet in a couple of important senses. He uses meter and rhyme, and he tells stories. In our poem today, we’ve got rollicking hexameter lines, mimicking the action of the sea, with a varying number of “weak” or unstressed syllables between the stresses — usually one or two, but sometimes none at all. The form has at least two great virtues. One is that it recalls the heroic meter of ancient Greek and Latin epic poetry. I won’t get into that too much here, except to say that, as Masefield knew very well, those classical lines had always the same number of “feet,” but a varying number of syllables, almost always between 13 and 17 (once in a very long while you may get 12). So the lines are “classical,” but they’re also popular. That is, English folk songs might also have the same number of strong beats, but a variety of “notes” in between, sometimes a quarter-note, sometimes two eighth-notes. The poem keeps its strong relation to music, to song — and that’s perfect, too, because Masefield says he wants a “merry yarn” on his sea-voyage, for what would a voyage be without stories, often best told in song?
I’m no seafarer, but when I read a poem like this, I wish I were — or I wish, for some brief and glorious time in youth, that I had been. Masefield doesn’t say that it’s the best life. He doesn’t say that it’s the only life for him. But the wildness of it, the danger, and the camaraderie, they are things it may require something like an ocean for us to experience and to remember. Captain Kirk thought so too, as he quotes from this very poem — and how’s that for a nod toward that old show which was always either Gunsmoke or Paradise Lost in outer space?
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
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