Tag Archives: John Masefield

A Moses Poem for a Lost Child

By Robin Bates | Published: August 19, 2023

Mourning her dead child, this writer chose to read a poem echoing the infant Moses story.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Cargoes", "Jabberwocky", "Late Fragment", "Moses", "Sonnet 29", "Taking Care", "Theme in Yellow", Calista Buchen, Carl Sandburg, child's death, death and dying, Lewis Carroll, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Raymon Carver, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Dreaming of Travel during Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2020

A very smart Covid poem circulating on social media at the moment references 11 poems, all about longing to travel.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "Lake Isle of Innisfree", "Sea Fever", "Green Eye of the Yellow God", "Mandalay", "Milford Haven", "Rolling English Road", "Skye Boat Song", "Upon First reading Chapman's Homer", A. E. Housman, COVID-19, Crown, G.K. Chesterton, J. Milton Hayes, John Keats, Kenneth Grahame, Loveliest of Trees, Michael Drayton, Midsummer Night's Dream, Outlanders, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Boulton, W. B. Yeats, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, wind in the willows | Comments closed

Imagining Little Ocean’s Future

By Robin Bates | Published: October 22, 2018

Looking for the literary significance of my latest grandchild, I turn to Walcott, Whitman, Masefield, Coleridge, and Byron. What emerges is a mystical seeker.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", "Sea Fever", "Tales of the Islands", baby names, Derek Walcott, J. D. Salinger, John Milton, Laurence Sterne, Lord Byron, Lucille Clifton, Paradise Lost, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, To Esme with Love and Squalor, Tristram Shandy, Walt Whitman, William Blake | Comments closed

O Christ Who Drives the Furrow Straight

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2017

John Masefield’s poem “Everlasting Mercy” (1911) uses powerful fertility image to capture the spirit of Christian redemption in this Good Friday poem.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Everlasting Mercy, Good Friday | Comments closed

The Lonely Sea and the Sky

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2014

The spirit of Maryland’s overnight Governor’s Cup sailboat race is captured in John Masefield’s well known “Sea Fever.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Sea Fever", Governor's Cup Race, Sailing, Sports | Comments closed

I Must Down to the Seas Again

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2011

I can imagine my student sailor liking John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.” She knows what it’s like to give oneself over to “the gull’s way and the whale’s way” and how the wind can feel like a whetted knife.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Sea Fever", Sailing, Sports | Comments closed