POETIC LICENCE

Iam indebted to my friend Lawrence Sisitka for lending me a wonderful book to read, one which might well have passed me by otherwise. Called Letters to Reyna, it is by the poet John Masefield, who died in 1967. The book consists of letters sent by Masefield, by that time an old man, to a woman called Audrey Napier-Smith, a violinist with the world-renowned Hallé Orchestra. Their correspondence began in 1952 and continued for fifteen years until Masefield’s death.

John Masefield’s courteous and loving letters to her are of another age: he was very much a Victorian gentleman. Born in 1878 at Ledbury, Herefordshire, a long way from the English coast, Masefield found himself at 13 aboard HMS Conway to train as an officer in the Merchant Navy, and it was here and in the years to follow that he developed, through much danger and hardship, an abiding love for the sea and sailing ships.

Life aboard ship was gruelling and often perilous. He sailed at the age of 16 from Cardiff bound for Iquique, Chile, an ordeal that included the harrowing passage around Cape Horn, before eventually finding himself three years later back in England, sick, exhausted and near death.

These experiences set the tone for much of his later writing, both poetry and prose, and the correspondence with "Reyna" illustrates how passionate and deeply knowledgeable he was – truly of another world.

Although appointed Poet Laureate in 1930, a post he held for 37 years, he remained very much a man who had lived a tough life among ordinary, hard-working people. Perhaps because of this, his poetry was extremely popular during his lifetime. Perhaps too because its rhythmic, rhymed, ballad-like cadences were easy to remember and to recite, as my own father attested.

Largely forgotten and ignored now, Masefield’s verse is nevertheless still worth finding. When my brother Dave visited South Africa for the first time in 2013, we determined to scatter our father’s ashes (he had died in 2010) into the ocean at Chintsa. Just Dave and me – and some carefully chosen poetry.

Dave read this one, one of Dad’s lifelong favourites:

Sea-Fever

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.

And I’d like to add another, with thanks again to Lawrence Sisitka for the opportunity:

An Epilogue

I have seen flowers come in stony places And kind things done by men with ugly faces, And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races, So I trust, too.

JohnMasefield (BothpoemsfromSea-Fever:SelectedPoemsofJohn Masefield,CarcanetPress,2005)