He is seeking always to be that which he
is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows
he can never wholly possess.
'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'
The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe,
from a consciousness of anaemia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'
And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time.
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