british poetry in the age of modernism

ostensibly justified by the direct passion of his unlettered speakers. For all
his pouring forth, though, a self-conscious directness is evident in the
drunken reprobate Saul Kane, hero ofThe Everlasting Mercy:

And looking round I felt a spite

At all who’d come to see me fight;

The five and forty human faces

Inflamed by drink and going to races,

Faces of men who’d never been

Merry or true or live or clean;

Who’d never felt the boxer’s trim

Of brain divinely knit to limb,

Nor felt the whole live body go

One tingling health from top to toe.^108

The false innocence of ‘merry or true or live or clean’ reveals Mase-
field presenting his character in the act of being simple, not actually
being simple. These are descriptions of simplicity by someone complex,
and their admiration is consequently detached; ‘merry’, ‘true’, ‘live’ and
‘clean’ are not virtue but feelings ofvirtuousness, as the bodily self-
admiration then proposed is not health but the remoter feeling of
healthiness. Here Masefield resembles W. W. Gibson, a writer whose
working-class speakers frequently stop to admire themselves or check
how they are feeling:

When, my heart answering to the call,

I followed down the seaward stream

By silent pool and singing fall,

Till with a quiet, keen content

I watched the sun, a crimson ball,

Shoot through grey seas, a fiery gleam

Then sink in opal deeps from sight.

(‘Devil’s Edge’)

Out of the sparkling sea

I drew my tingling body clear and lay

On a low ledge the livelong summer day...

(‘Hit’)

By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes

On colours ripe and rich for the heart’s desire...

And as I lingered lost in divine delight,

My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight

And all youth’s lively senses keen and quick...

(‘Sight’)^109

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