He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.
Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--
'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
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