Poem of the week: Sea-Fever by John Masefield

The Guardian

2 days ago

Sea-Fever
I must 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 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 seagulls crying.
I must 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.
My poetry-reading these days falls into two main categories, discovery and re-discovery. But sometimes they overlap. Discovery doesn't dawn only from new poets and collections. Dusting off work I'm supposedly familiar with can suddenly reveal new perspectives, especially with a good editor as guide.
Last week I re-read John Masefield as the result of a conversation with a writer-friend who gives readings to groups of adult-newcomers to poetry, often bringing well-known hits into his playlist. We soon got into a conversation about John Masefield's Sea-Fever (tried, tested but, we agreed, far from tired) and he raised a question about the first line: should it be 'I must go down to the seas again' or 'I must down to the seas again'? I wasn't sure; he wasn't sure.
I checked in at home with the almost eponymous Sea-Fever: Selected Poems, edited by Philip W Errington, published in 2023. Errington has re-printed the poem as it appeared in Masefield's first collection, Salt Water Ballads, 1902, where the word 'go' is also omitted.
The 'saltiness' in these early poems is often supplied by the mariners' dialect as they discuss death at sea, whether by shipwreck or as the result of yellow fever. When Masefield's poetic persona is close to himself, any lingering saline trace of dialect is washed by an inflowing fresh water tide of romantic longing. The sea is an image of seemingly free movement, and poems like The West Wind and Sea-Fever itself convey that double-expanse: the ever-moving sea and wind, and the human freedom these elements can symbolise.
Less specific than some of the poems about the technicalities of sailing, Sea-Fever is a picture made of verbs, assonance, and the conjunction 'and', woven into the rhythmic strokes of a seven-beat line that joins what would be two lines in a traditional ballad. In each of the Sea-Fever quatrains, two couplets share a shanty-like call-and-response. The first ends firmly on the final stress ('sky', 'by'/ 'tide, 'denied'/ 'life', 'knife') while the second revises the rhythmic emphasis with feminine endings ('shaking', 'breaking'/ 'flying', 'crying'/ 'fellow-rover', 'over'). Herring-gulls are constantly 'crying' in that long 'i' sound. But a word with a short 'i' ('trick') is the clinching effect in the last line: as so often, the voyage concludes with death, but the characterisation of life as 'the long trick' is what stands out, suddenly intruding on those cliches of 'quiet sleep' and 'sweet dream' with an unforeseeable adjective-noun combination: 'And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.'
But what of that first line, and the word 'go' – added for the first time in Ballads and Poems, 1910, present in the 1922 Selected Poems, lacking in the 1923 Collected Poems, but back in place in the revised Collected Poems in 1946?
Errington quotes from Linda Hart's A First Line Mystery published in The Journal of the John Masefield Society in 1993: 'When asked, in 1927, about the first line of the poem, Masefield stated '… I notice that in the early edition, 1902, I print the line 'I must down'. That was as I wrote the line in the first instance … When I am reciting the poem I usually insert the word 'go'. When the poem is spoken I feel the need of the word but in print 'go' is unnecessary and looks ill.''
From Masefield's comments, it seems he found 'I must down to the seas again' unnatural to speak, but that he preferred it to the less jinglingly dactylic rhythm that 'go' created on the page. 'I must down' is literary, antiquated diction for 1902. The omission of the preposition has distinguished idiomatic ancestry, though. There's a similar turn of phrase from Shakespeare in King Lear, when Lear says to Cordelia: 'Come, let's away to prison …'
The noticeable jolt in Sea-Fever from the reference to 'the vagrant gypsy life' is explained in another illuminating editorial note. In manuscript drafts the poem begins, sea-less, 'I must go down to the roads again' or 'I must out on the roads again'. Those discarded 'roads' might have led Masefield to the kenning-like 'gull's way' and 'whale's way'. Perhaps the freedom of the sea and that of the open road and the community of the travellers remained joined together in Masefield's imagination.
By omitting the all-too-necessary 'roads', the Wolverhampton-based poet of the new 20th century expresses the hallucinatory quality of his longing for what had been a mixed blessing at the time, the life of a sailor. His first impulse, to avoid the pedestrian 'go down', is the right one. He is murmuring to himself as if in a fever-dream: 'I must down to the seas again …'