'With Squeaky Wit the Light, Improper Verse'

Without context or other clue, who do you think might have written this tart little couplet?: 

“With squeaky wit the light, improper verse

Falls on the heavy lunch and makes it worse.”

 

I first encountered him in the eighth grade, in English class. He was sold to us as the “poet of the sea,” a sort of safer, less Slavic alternative to Joseph Conrad. His poems were “rousing” and at age thirteen, both parents dead, he had gone to sea aboard the HMS Conway. He jumped ship while still a teenager and spent two years working in a carpet factory in Yonkers, of all places. Some of us were tempted to sing “Sea Fever” (Salt-Water Ballads, 1902) -- “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 . . .” Around the same time I memorized parts of Kipling’s equally singable “Danny Deever” (Barrack-Room Ballads, 1890). Both are excellent accompaniments to long walks.

 

According to Constance Babington Smith in John Masefield: A Life (1978), the poet wrote the uncharacteristic couplet above in his pocket diary in 1922 after attending a lunch at Oxford for Honorary Doctors, including himself, after that year’s Encaenia. By this point, Smith has already made it clear that Masefield was renowned for his “niceness.” He was one of nature’s Romantics despite his Dickensian childhood, born into but never a part of literary modernism. In “Epilogue,” added to the final edition of his Complete Poems, Masefield returns to niceness:

 

“I have seen flowers come in stony places

And kind things done by men with ugly faces,

And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,

So I trust, too.”

 

I might speculate that no one reads Masefield today but for the existence of the John Masefield Society says otherwise. Kingsley Amis writes in the preface to The Faber Popular Reciter, his 1978 anthology:

 

“Clarity, heavy rhythms, strong rhymes and the rest are the vehicles of confidence, of a kind of innocence, of shared faiths and other long-extinct states of mind. The two great themes of popular verse were the nation and the Church, neither of which, to say the least, confers much sense of community any longer.”

 

Amis’ anthology includes two poems by Masefield – “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes.” Masefield was born on this date, June 1, in 1878, became Poet Laureate in 1913 and remained in that post until his death in 1967.