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Whether or not Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his sonnets is impossible to determine. Wordsworth thought he did, Browning thought quite otherwise. But these sonnets of our poet are undoubtedly subjective; no one without the necessary information would guess them to come from the author of The Everlasting Mercy. They reveal what has always been--through moving accidents by flood and field--the master passion of his mind and heart, the worship of Beauty. The entire series illustrates a tribute to Beauty expressed in the first one--"Delight in her made trouble in my mind." This mental disturbance is here the spur to composition. They are experiments in relative, meditative, speculative poetry; and while they contain some memorable lines, and heighten one's respect for the dignity and sincerity of their author's temperament, they are surely not so successful as his other work. They are not clearly articulate. Instead of the perfect expression of perfect thoughts--a gift enjoyed only by
Shakespeare--they reveal the extreme difficulty of metrically voicing his "trouble." It is in a way like the music of the Liebestod. He is struggling to say what is in his mind, he approaches it, falls away comes near again, only to be finally baffled.
In 1918 Mr. Masefield returned to battle, murder and sudden death in the romantic poem Rosas. This is an exciting tale told in over a hundred stanzas, and it is safe to say that any one who reads the first six lines will read to the end without moving in his chair. Although this is the latest in publication of our poet's works, it sounds as if it were written years ago, before he had attained the mastery so evident in The Widow in the Bye Street. It will add little to the author's reputation.
I do not think Mr. Masefield has received sufficient credit for his prose fiction. In 1905 he published A Mainsail Haul, which contained a number of short stories and sketches, many of which had appeared in the Manchester Guardian