Today’s Poem: Sea-Fever

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying

Edward Hopper, Sailing, 1911 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sea-Fever

by John Masefield

I must go 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 go 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 sea-gulls crying.
 
I must go 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.
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In 1916, John Masefield (1878–1967) published a collection of poetry called Salt-Water Ballads, and in its pages was Today’s Poem, the 1902 “Sea-Fever.” Remember Alfred Noyes’s 1906 “The Highwayman” or maybe Robert Service’s 1907 “The Cremation of Sam McGee”? Like them, “Sea-Fever” quickly found an audience — becoming one of those poems that take up a permanent home in the popular mind.

Thinking about “Sea-Fever,” we could mention the gypsy, vagabond spirit that had a fad among some poets in those days (as in “A Vagabond Song,” the 1896 Bliss Carman poem we looked at last year here at Poems Ancient and Modern). Or recall the long tradition of sea poetry. (J.D. McClatchy’s 2001 anthology, Poems of the Sea, is a place to start.) Or dwell on the culture’s loss, in the long years since, of shared middlebrow poetry. Or even contemplate Masefield’s time as the British poet laureate — from 1930 to 1967, the longest tenure after Tennyson’s (and strange to think of the author of Today’s Poem as still laureate in the Swinging Sixties of London’s Carnaby Street.)

John Masefield in 1913 (Wikimedia Commons)

But I want to take a moment and consider the meter of “Sea-Fever.” The poem is heptameter, seven stresses a line, built from three four-line stanzas rhymed aabb, with the first couplet a masculine rhyme on the stressed last syllable, and the second couplet a feminine rhyme of two syllables, stressed on the penultimate syllable: sky / by in Lines 1 and 3, and shaking / breaking in Lines 2 and 4. And the meter is accentual: each line with seven pretty loud stresses but not divisible into regular feet. “Accentual meter” means that the length of the line doesn’t matter, as long as there are the correct number of stresses somewhere within it.

And yet, the poem, I’ve come to think, is doing something subtler, and simply calling the meter accentual doesn’t do it justice. In the phrase that opens each stanza, I must go down to the seas again, Masefield actually added the “go” after the first publication, and he was right to do so, not just for easier sense but also for rhythm. The poem’s lines break consistently into a four-stress part and a three-stress part, which is the pattern of ballad meter:

I must go 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

The meter here has a suggestion — a breath, as it were — of anapests, but the repeated opening phrase hints more at the dactylic and trochaic. And so we could feel a play, a rocking motion, of a falling rhythm in the first part of the line, and a rising rhythm in the second part: Ì must go / dòwn to the / sèas a- / gain // for the càll / of the rùn- / ning tìde. (The opening could also be read as I mùst go, but that doesn’t ruin the point.)

And yet, that play is not sufficient explanation of the poem’s rhythmic flow, either. Best, I think, is to read the poem as actually consisting of feet in a very traditional sense — but with those feet allowed to be irregular. That would help us see why the pile-up of three stresses in a row (which each of the three stanza’s final lines has) doesn’t feel clunky. I read, for example, Line 4 as And a grèy / mìst / on the sèa’s / fàce, // and a grèy / dawn / break-ing. This system of feet within the accentual meter also helps with the paired stresses in other lines — the kennings, for example, in To the gùll’s / wày / and the whàle’s / wày // where the wìnd’s / like a whèt- / ed knife.

Looking at Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” in one of our early posts here at Poems Ancient and Modern — another poem with an accentual pile-up — I suggested that “meter is like music: highly technical and yet natural at the same time.” And John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” is a clear instance. Metrically, it’s knotted, fiddly stuff, and yet we never lose our footing on the deck of the ship by which Masefield takes us out to sea

Paul Gauguin, Sailing Vessel in Moonlight, 1878 (Wikimedia Commons)

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