Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/221

THE YELLOW PATCH 195 attracted him, that he stuck to his bosuns and buccaneers simply out of love of their loot : that it was out of the topazes and emeralds and gold moidores that his songs were really fashioned. A craving for bright things, small things — things vivid, tense, and shapely — for single stars, single notes, gems, colours like enamels, pictures like the little pictures in missals, and flowers like those that burn on embroideries — that is plainly the human motive here. The best of these verses are those that chime gaily, jewelled in every action, merely pretending to commemorate rude deeds. The worst are those written from a solemn sense of serving beauty. Remembering his sacred office, remembering this is poetry, he seems to gulp back the lilt, heave the Celtic sigh, thin the measure out with dummy notes : — The tick of the blood is settling slow, my heart will soon be still. And ripe and ready am I for rest in the grave atop of the hill ; So gather me up and lay me down, for ready and ripe am I For the weary vigil with sightless eyes that may not see the sky. It is pure superstition, of course: the tick isn't " settling slow," at all — it can distinctly be heard beneath the arbitrary drone, a second metre incompletely overlaid. It betrays the truth to us now — that Masefield was no more ready and ripe than a skylark about to ascend, that the real tune in his head was ru7n-tiddle-tum^ and that he padded it out with an extra turn out of decorum. So that already it would have been possible to deduce that we had here a man with (a) a keen belief in life's kindling picturesqueness, (6) a firm resolve to render it worthily, (c) an imaginative love for compactness and vividness, for exact, ringing, minute images and sounds, and {d) a special power of dwelling