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| John Masefield, frontispiece from Selected Poems |
When the First World War began in 1914, John Masefield, the second-longest serving Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (1930-1967), was 34 years old. Just one month earlier, he had entertained Rupert Brooke as a house guest, the two men reading poetry and walking the Berkshire Downs together. An established writer, Masefield responded to the outbreak of war almost immediately with the poem “August, 1914.” Published in the English Review that September, it is a lengthy poem. This excerpt recalls the men who, leaving for war,
Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,
And so by ship to sea, and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
Nor the dear outline of the English shore,
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolting second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air….
Masefield had initially attempted to join the army, but was rejected for medical reasons, so he joined the reserves, briefly serving at the front as a medical orderly and later as a war historian, writing Gallipoli (1916), The Old Front Line (1917), and The Battle of the Somme (1919). Most of Masefield’s experiences of the war found expression in prose accounts of the battle sites he visited, and not in poetry. Masefield later explained,
When the war began, I wrote some verses, called “August, 1914” …. Some other verses were written in the first months of the war, including some of the sonnets, but that was the end of my verse-writing. Perhaps, when the war is over and the mess of the war is cleaned up and the world is at some sort of peace, there may be leisure and feeling for verse-making.*
But Masefield did write another poem of the First World War, although it was not published until long after the war had ended, appearing in the 1939 volume The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross. The poem almost certainly draws from Masefield’s own experiences in the Great War: it can be read in its entirety with context notes in International Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology of Lost Voices.
Masefield, like many others, found it difficult to write and speak of his war experiences. Canadian soldier Amos William Mayse wrote to his wife, “I am sure that if spared I shall wake often with the horror of it all before me & I shall not want to talk much about it either.”** What other soldiers found difficult to talk about, Masefield found difficult to shape into poetry. “Red Cross” is Masefield’s delayed war poem; published over twenty years after his experiences of the Great War, he anticipated the war that was to come.
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* John Masefield, “Preface,” The Poems and Plays of John Masefield: Volume One Poems, Macmillan, 1920, p. xviii.
** Amos William Mayse, letter to wife & kiddies, 23 June 1917, Canadian Letters & Images Project, Stephen Davies, Project Director, web.archive.org/save/https://www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-9835.