The wind's song: why 'Sea-Fever' is the gift that keeps on giving

On John Masefield's 'long trick'

La vague by Gustav Courbet (1819-1877), Southampton City Art Gallery

When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem: its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment).¹ This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’. You can read it here but let’s have it again. There may or may not be a missing word: more on that later.

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.

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have this one too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our son in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say out loud.

‘Sea-Fever’ was first published in 1902 in John Masefield’s first book of poems, Salt-Water Ballads. The reference to ballads is for effect (authenticity was just coming into fashion again in 1900). It is also true. ‘Sea-Fever’ has the quality of a song for voices: if you say it enough times, it creates its own music. The poem has been set to music several times, but I don’t think this quite works and that is not quite what I mean. I don’t just mean that it sounds good, either. Rather, the words have such a strong tug that they literally create their own melody.

Like a real ballad, the tune can vary. I do it a little differently each time. I won’t subject you to my efforts, but you can hear something like a tune emerging in Masefield’s own reading of another poem here. Or you can hear how it works in a real ballad by listening to someone like Joseph Taylor (the British Library recordings have gone awol but there are some on YouTube).²

But ‘Sea-Fever’ isn’t actually a ballad, because it lives on the page too. You can enjoy it without singing it (though, like I say, as soon as you speak it, there is a tug…). There’s a fascinating discussion in Rumens’s piece about the first line: “I must down to the sea again”. In its original form, the poem didn’t include the ‘go’ that most of us would expect (you might, like me, not even notice that it was missing) and which sometimes returns in later editions.

Rumens’s own explanation for what is going on, and for preferring the first version, is wonderful and gets us right to the heart of the poem. In Masefield’s manuscripts, the first line didn’t even include the sea (Masefield writes “I must go down to the roads again” or “I must out on the roads again”). The loss of the roads and the loss of the verb, Rumens suggests, both express the ‘hallucinatory quality’ of Masefield longing for the sailor’s life in landlocked Wolverhampton:

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…”

And yet… when Masefield recites the poem, he includes ‘go’. And Masefield is right too. As he puts it:

…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.

What we are encountering here is the very real difference between reading in our heads and reading aloud. The eye, and the inner ear, enjoys a little ambiguity: we can see “must down” and ‘hear’ both the simple, strong rhythm (“I must go down to the sea again”) and the more subtle one which allows for Rumens’s feverish murmer.³ But when you speak the poem, you have to choose and Masefield usually chooses the version which sets the rhythm up clearly from the start. As, I suspect, do most of the poem’s readers and rememberers. Without ‘go’ the poem wouldn’t be as popular as it is.

I will wrap this up now (do read Rumens’s piece). One more thought before I do. The other reason why ‘Sea-Fever’ is so well-loved is the ending: people often request for it to be read at their funerals, because of the sailing or seaside connection, but also, surely, because of the promise offered in that final line: a “quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over”.

As Rumens points out, the line hinges on that penultimate word, the short vowel in ‘trick’, thrown up after so many longer ones. It is a surprise, too, perhaps even a welcome one, to think of life as a ‘trick’, though there is also a wonderful, soothing sense of inevitability to it all: ‘over’ is exactly where it needs to be, the so-called ‘feminine’ ryhme softening the fall.⁴

But the poem is softer still. The ‘trick’ would have been less of a surprise to Masefield, or to anyone who had served on tall ships like him. A ‘trick’ is another name for a sailor’s watch. It is not that death isn’t present somewhere (it clearly is), but Masefield blurs it in with all our other sleeps. Sleep being something we would all want after a long day at sea.

PS we will be doing Across the Bay next time, sticking with the maritime theme. Please send any first thoughts on the back of a postcard.

1. Speaking of: I enjoyed Don Paterson’s discussion of Robert Frost’s ‘The Pasture’, which turns out to be a very nasty poem indeed, as Frost's almost always are. I do wonder if the nasty surprise says as much about modern readers as it does about Frost, the way in which we’ve become so detached from the reality of farming.

2. Thank you to Sean Ansell for explaining this and for putting me on to Taylor.

3. When Masefield says the poem looks ‘ill’ in print with ‘go’, he is saying something about how we feel about poems. That they aren’t songs.

4. Surely someone’s come up with a non-gendered word for this effect by now?