"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky …"

Who of us does not feel a thrill and a tingle on reading those immortal lines, and which sailor cannot but admire that art which evokes the draw of the sea so precisely? When in 1902, at the age of 24, John Masefield published 'Salt-Water Ballads', his first book of verse, which included that best known poem, and that other one, 'Cargoes', he was acclaimed England's foremost poet of the sea. From that point on, he was able to make his living as a freelance writer and was eventually, in 1930, appointed Poet Laureate. But how had he as a young man contracted such virulent sea-fever? How did his formative youth bring him to be so passionately enthralled by the sea?

"… Then other days by water, by bright sea, Clear as clean glass and my bright friend with me, The cove clean bottomed where we saw the brown Red spotted plaice go skimming six feet down And saw the long fronds waving, white with shells, Waving unfolding, dropping, to the swells …"

It was a passion not only for its beauty, but with a profound respect for its perils, such as the lurking menace of "hidden rocks" in Cardigan Bay –

"… Clean, green, windy billows notching out the sky, Grey clouds tattered into rags, sea-winds blowing high, And the ships under topsails, beating, thrashing by, And the mewing of the herring gulls. Dancing, flashing green seas shaking white locks, Boiling in blind eddies over hidden rocks, And the wind in the rigging, the creaking of the blocks, And the straining of the timber hulls. Delicate, cool sea-weeds, green and amber-brown, In beds where shaken sunlight slowly filters down On many a drowned seventy-four, many a sunken town, And the whitening of the dead men's skull"

Masefield grew up inland, in a small country town in Herefordshire, the son of a solicitor. His secure family life collapsed, however, first with the death of his mother, then six years later his father too, so that in 1891 at the age of thirteen he was sent away to join the merchant navy training vessel Conway in the port of Liverpool. Suddenly, he had been transplanted into a harsh and completely alien world, that of the docks, seamen, ships and the sea. Life was rough, but also inspiring. It marked him and fired his imagination throughout the rest of his life. He experienced both the brutality –

"… Your nose is red jelly, your mouth's a toothless wreck, And I'm atop of you, banging your head upon the dirty deck ... "

– as well as the companionship of life aboard ship, and absorbed the yarns and lore of the seamen around him; he loved the telling of stories and was a good story-teller himself. He also loved to go aloft from where he could survey all the ships in port. He was fascinated by the ships, he had intimate knowledge of them and his writing on them is vivid and detailed –

"… That splendour of fine bows which yet could stand The shock of rollers never checked by land. That art of masts, sail-crowned, fit to break, Yet stayed to strength and backstayed into rake …"

He became senior petty officer in the Conway and, in 1894, at fifteen, he was taken on as apprentice aboard the Gilcruix for his first and only ocean-voyage under sail, bound for the west coast of America via Cape Horn.

As a novice, the anticipation of Cape Horn as every sailors' nightmare made him wonder whether the stories of it had not been exaggerated. He was soon to find out that they were not. As the ship became bound in an ice-storm for thirty-two days, his diary accounts abruptly stop, but the terror and the horror he experienced at first hand are clear in one of his narrative poems (Dauber) –

"…Drenched, frozen, gasping, blinded, beaten dumb, High in the night, reeling great blinding arcs As the ship rolled, his chappy fingers numb, The deck below a narrow blur of marks, The sea a welter of whiteness shot with sparks, Now snapping up in bursts, now dying away, Salting the horizontal snow with spray … … How long the gale had blown he could not tell, Only the world had changed, his life had died. A moment now was everlasting hell, Nature and onslaught from the weather side, A withering rush of death, a frost that cried, Shrieked, til he withered at the heart; a hail Plastered his oilskins with icy mail … "

Masefield was taken off ship in Chile and hospitalised for several weeks in Valparaiso before being shipped back to England by steamer as a distressed seaman.

Back home, his guardian soon enlisted him on another Liverpool ship, the Bidston Hill, which he was to join in New York. (Bidston Hill is a landmark on the Wirral: in transit with the lighthouse at Leasowe it used to guide shipping into the Rock Channel entrance to the Mersey.) But Masefield was having none of it. He deserted, cut himself adrift to wander as a tramp, then took a job in a carpet mill for two years. He aspired to enter medical school but, thwarted by lack of funds, returned to England and worked as a bank clerk for a while until he made a success of his writing. The harsh reality of working life aboard a sailing vessel was not for him.

Masefield's subsequent output in poems long and short, plays and novels, on a variety of themes, was prolific. But throughout his long life (he died aged 89) he repeatedly drew on his teenage maritime experience, ("... And an old man's past's a strange thing, for it never leaves his mind,") and it is for a few of his sea-poems that he is now most remembered. By encapsulating in verse those intense perceptions of his youth, he lets us share those "golden instants and bright days," and what it was to –

"… see those proud ones swaying home With mainyards backed and bows a cream of foam, Those bows so lovely-curving, cut so fine, Those coulters of the many-bubbled brine, As once, long since, when all the docks were filled With that sea-beauty man has ceased to build."

So, next time you feel that "call of the running tide," set a date in your diary this coming season to join me in the rally on the Wirral shore, and experience the waters of Liverpool Bay where the poet himself first felt that magic. JH

Books:

• Stanford, D.E. John Masefield, selected poems, (1988) Carcanet Press, Manchester, ISBN 0 85635 502 X.
• Babington Smith, C. John Masefield, a life, (1978)
• Dwyer, J. John Masefield, (1987) Ungar Publishing Company, New York, ISBN 0 8044 2164 1.
• Lamont, C. Remembering John Masefield, (1972) Kaye and Ward, London, ISBN 0 7182 0923 0.