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Giant Hours With Poet Preachers

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"Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Amen."

Salt Water Poems and Ballads.

And it is a most fascinating story to see him climb from his boyhood,
purely social, sympathetic interest in the outcast to that higher, that
highest social consciousness, vitalized with religion. Here, seems it
to me, that those who possess true social consciousness must come at
last if they do their most effective work for the social regeneration
of the world. Many have tremendous social consciousness, but no Christ.
Christ himself is the very pulse beat of the social regeneration.
Without him it must fail.

One feels, even here in his youth poems, however, a promise of that
deeper Masefield that later finds his soul in "The Everlasting Mercy."

2. _Faith in Immortality_

In "Rest Her Soul," these haunting lines with that expression of a deep
faith found in "All that dies of her," we find a ray of light, which
slants through a small window of the man that is to be:

"On the black velvet covering her eyes
Let the dull earth be thrown;
Her's is the mightier silence of the skies,
And long, quiet rest alone.
Over the pure, dark, wistful eyes of her,
O'er all the human, all that dies of her,
Gently let flowers be strown."

Salt Water Poems and Ballads.

But most of these ballads, as their title suggests, are nothing more
than the very sea foam of which they speak, and whose tale they tell;
as compared with that later, deeper verse of Christian hope and
regeneration.

And then pass those ten years; ten years following the period of "The
Salt Water Ballads"; and ten years following the time when he was a
"bar-boy" in New York; ten years in which he climbs from a simple
"social consciousness" to a social consciousness that has the heart
beat of Christ in its every line. The poems he writes in this period
are all of the Christ. "Good Friday," perhaps the strongest poem
dealing with this great day in Christ's life, is full of a close
knowledge of the spirit of the Man of Galilee. But it is in "The
Everlasting Mercy" and not "The Story of a Round House" that we find
Masefield at his big best, battering at the very doors of eternity with
the fist of a giant and the tender love of a woman, and the plea of a
penitent sinner.

Something had happened to Masefield in those ten years. A man's entire
life had been revolutionized; and his poetry with it. He still feels
the want and need of the world, and the social injustice; but he has
found the cure. In a word, he has been converted. I do not care whether
or no Masefield means to tell his own story in "The Everlasting Mercy,"
but I do know that he tells, in spite of himself, a story that fits
curiously into, and marvelously explains, the strange revolution and
change in his own life from "Salt Water Ballads" to "Good Friday."


II. CONVERSION

It is an old-fashioned Methodist conversion of which he tells, which
links itself up with the New Testament gospel of the regeneration of
a human soul in such a fascinating way that it gives those of us who
preach this gospel an impelling, modern, dramatic putting of the old,
old story, that will thrill our congregations and grip the hearts of
men who know not the Christ.

1. _Conviction of Sin_

Saul Kane was an amateur prizefighter. He and his friend Bill have a
fight in the opening lines of the tale, and Saul wins. This victory
is followed by the usual debauch, which lasts until all the drunken
crowd are asleep on the floor of the "Lion." No Russian novelist, nor
a Dostoievesky, nor another, ever dared such realism as Masefield has
given us in his picture of this night's sin. He makes sin all that it
is--black and hideous:

"From three long hours of gin and smokes,
And two girls' breath and fifteen blokes,
A warmish night and windows shut
The room stank like a fox's gut.
The heat, and smell, and drinking deep
Began to stun the gang to sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But this was too much for Saul Kane. He had still enough decency left
to be ashamed. He wanted air. He went to a window and threw it open:

"I opened window wide and leaned
Out of that pigsty of the fiend,
And felt a cool wind go like grace
About the sleeping market-place.
The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
The bells chimed, Holy, Holy, Holy;
And in a second's pause there fell
The cold note of the chapel bell,
And then a cock crew flapping wings,
And summat made me think of things!"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

There it is: sin, and conviction of sin. Perhaps he thought of another
man who had virtually betrayed the Christ, and the cock crew and made
that other "think o' things."

Then came the reaction from that conviction; the battle against that
same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ;
and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle
Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes
the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who
has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her
Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet how
insistently, how pleadingly she speaks:

"'Saul Kane,' she said, 'when next you drink,
Do me the gentleness to think
That every drop of drink accursed
Makes Christ within you die of thirst;
That every dirty word you say
Is one more flint upon His way,
Another thorn about His head,
Another mock by where He tread;
Another nail another cross;
All that you are is that Christ's loss.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

These searching words were beyond defeat. They went home to his already
convicted heart and mind like arrows. They hurt. They cut. They
awakened. They called. They pierced. They pounded with giant fists.
They lashed like spiked whips. They burned like a soul on fire. They
clamored, and they whispered like a mother's love, and at last his
heart opened:

2. _Forgiveness_

"I know the very words I said,
They bayed like bloodhounds in my head.
'The water's going out to sea
And there's a great moon calling me;
But there's a great sun calls the moon,
And all God's bells will carol soon
For joy and glory, and delight
Of some one coming home to-night.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then came the consciousness that he was "done with sin" forever:

"I knew that I had done with sin,
I knew that Christ had given me birth
To brother all the souls on earth,"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

which was followed by two "glories"--the "Glory of the Lighted Mind"
and the "Glory of the Lighted Soul." I think that perhaps in our
preaching on conversion we make too little of the regeneration of the
"mind." Masefield does not miss one whit of a complete regeneration.

3. _The Joy of Conversion_

"O glory of the lighted mind.
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind!
The station brook to my new eyes
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing, 'Christ has risen again!'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then the soul glory:

"O glory of the lighted Soul.
The dawn came up on Bradlow Knoll,
The dawn with glittering on the grasses,
The dawn which pass and never passes."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But that wasn't all. Masefield knows that the other self must be
completely eradicated, so he makes Saul Kane change his environment
entirely. He goes to the country. He plows, and as he plows he learns
the lesson of the soil and cries:

"O Jesus, drive the coulter deep
To plow my living man from sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And more word from Christ as he plowed:

"I knew that Christ was there with Callow,
That Christ was standing there with me,
That Christ had taught me what to be,
That I should plow and as I plowed
My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,
And as I drove the clods apart
Christ would be plowing in my heart,
Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,
Through all my bad life's rotten fruits."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield
starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more
apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then
comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely
find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally
that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps
from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of
forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the
uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And
so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of
that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry,
pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes,
"Would make the dead arise!"




VIII

ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the
Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New
York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New
York.]

A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES;
OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD


A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this
sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of
this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you
quoted--they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were
from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's
turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and
high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death.

And the lines that gripped the layman were:

"I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I've watched the big husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim;
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming
And the stars tumbled out neck and crop;
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming
With the peace o' the world piled on top."

The Spell of the Yukon.

[Illustration: ROBERT SERVICE.]

Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to
him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his
own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who
read:

"The summer--no sweeter was ever,
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill;
The strong life that never knows harness,
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freedom, the freshness, the farness;
O God! how I'm stuck on it all!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows
that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to
love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with
a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for
the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:

"Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro,
Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know
That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be
the last to go.

"Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand
Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand,
Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God:

"But the stars throng out in their glory,
And they sing of the God in man;
They sing of the Mighty Master,
Of the loom his fingers span,
Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,
And weft in the wondrous plan.

"Here by the camp-fire's flicker,
Deep in my blanket curled,
I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
And the wind and the wave are silent,
And world is singing to world."

The Spell of the Yukon.

"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call
of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the
great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths
which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the
soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:

"Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down,
yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do
things!"--the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great
needs:

"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--."

The Spell of the Yukon.


SIN AND DEATH

The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the
father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel
northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he
learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material
quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're
wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"

"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Or another verse:

"I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it--
Came out with a fortune last fall--
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl
our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come
to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,

"All you can take in your cold, dead hand
Is what you have given away."

And how the warning against sin hurtles its
way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:

"It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it's been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the
guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting
Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you."
Service says the same thing in "It grips you."


GOD AND HEAVEN

Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and
Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the
trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God
out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the
gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who
know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?

"I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring
wings;
It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the
timeless things,
And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in
my heart-strings!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

This God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:

"Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail;
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A farness that never will fail;
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
A manhood that irks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he
is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at
every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail:


JUST THINK!

"Just think! some night the stars will gleam
Upon a cold, grey stone,
And trace a name with silver beam,
And lo! 'twill be your own,

"That night is speeding on to greet
Your epitaphic rhyme.
Your life is but a little beat
Within the heart of Time.

"A little gain, a little pain,
A laugh lest you may moan;
A little blame, a little fame,
A star-gleam on a stone."

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death
and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical
rules of conduct that they do, expressed in Service's "The Woman and
the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and
withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning
woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him:

"Then sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled:
'You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.
We have outlived the old standards; we have burst like an overtight
thong
The ancient outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"
"Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His
side,
For O, the woman was wondrous, and O, the angel was tried!
And deep in his hell sang the devil, and this was the strain of his
song:
'The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And I doubt not, but that we all need that warning not to give up "The
ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."


RHYMES OF A RED CROSS MAN

Here it is that we find a consciousness of the Eternal creeping through
the smoke and din and glare. Here, like the hard, dangerous life of the
Alaskan trails, only harder and more dangerous; here amid war in "The
Fool" we catch six last lines that thrill us:

"He died with the glory of faith in his eyes,
And the glory of love in his heart.
And though there's never a grave to tell,
Nor a cross to mark his fall,
Thank God we know that he "batted well"
In the last great Game of all."

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

And even amid the terrible thunder of war the "Lark" sings, as Service
reminds us in his poem of that name, sings and points to heaven:

"Pure heart of song! do you not know
That we are making earth a hell?
Or is it that you try to show
Life still is joy and all is well?
Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain
You beat into that bit of blue:
Lo! we who pant in war's red rain
Lift shining eyes, see Heaven too!"

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

To close this study of Service, which has run from the hard battle
ground of the Alaskan trails to the harder battle ground of France;
which has run from a study of white peaks and white lives, to high
peaks and high hopes, through sin and death to heaven and the Father
himself, I quote the closing lines of Service's "The Song of the Wage
Slave," which will remind the reader in tone and spirit of Markham's
"The Man with the Hoe":

"Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I've done thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over--Master, I've earned it--Rest."




[Illustration: RUPERT BROOKE.]

IX

RUPERT BROOKE
[Footnote: The poetical selections from the writings of Rupert Brooke
appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, published by John Lane Company,
New York.]

PREACHER OF FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, COUNTRY, GODS, AND GOD


Wilfred Gibson expressed it for us all; voiced the sorrow and the
hope in the death of Rupert Brooke, a victim of the Hun as well as that
other giant of art, the Rheims Cathedral; expressed it in these lines
written shortly after Rupert Brooke died:

"He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That, as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow--
And he was gone,"

Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the
downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with
sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines,
and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also
beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our
friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from
eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.

And you yourself, war-dead poet, you sang your end, full knowing that
it would come, as it did on foreign soil, far from the England that you
loved and voiced so wondrously. And now these lines that you wrote of
your own possible passing have new meaning for us who remain to mourn
your going:

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a
striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love
of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your
place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger--a quartette of
immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland,
"faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a
youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a
gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough
to save the world.


THE GOSPEL OF FRIENDSHIP

Among the few definite, outstanding gospels that Brooke preached is
seen the gospel of friendship. In "The Jolly Company" he says:

"O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends, radiant and inseparable!"

"Light-hearted and glad they seemed to me
And merry comrades, even so
God out of heaven may laugh to see.--"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

Then, again, in a poem which he called "Lines Written in the Belief
That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia," he
voices in an even more striking quatrain the immortality of friendship.
What a thrill of hope runs through us here as we, who believe that life
brings no richer gold than friendship, read this poet's thought that
friendship too shall last beyond the years!

"And I know, one night, on some far height,
In the tongue I never knew,
I yet shall hear the tidings clear
From them that were friends of you.--"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.


THE GOSPEL OF LOVE

And where Friendship sweeps into love who shall tell, or where the
dividing line is? But while Brooks lived he forgot not love. His was a
throbbing, beating love whose light was a beacon night and day; a
beacon of which he was not ashamed. He set the fires of romantic love
burning and when he went away he left them burning so that their light
might light the way for other poets and other lovers and other
travelers when they came. He believed, like Noyes, that love should not
be weak; that that was the great hope. Noyes said:

"But one thing is needful, and ye shall be true
To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek;
Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you
If ye love one another if your love be not weak."

From Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.

Now I do not mean to suggest that the love that Brooke sang was exactly
the type that Noyes sang in these four lines. In fact, one feels a
difference as he reads the two English poets, but they are alike in
that each agreed that Love should not be weak, whatever it was. Brooke
sang of romantic love, high and holy as that is; love of Youth for
Maiden, lad for lass, and man for woman; and thank God for the high
clean song that he gave to it in such lines as in "The Great Lover":

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