Biography

Men do not heed the rungs by which men climb

Those glittering steps, those milestones upon time

Those tombstones of dead selves,

Those hours of birth,

Those moments of the soul in years of earth.

They mark the height achieved, the main result,

The power of freedom in the perished cult,

The power of boredom in the dead man’s deeds,

Not the bright moments of the sprinkled seeds.[1]

-       Mansfield[2]

---

[1] The lines here reprinted are only the second stanza of Biography, a very lengthy poem.

[2] John Masefield (the citation has the surname wrong) was born in 1878 in Herefordshire, England. After being orphaned at an early age, he was sent to sea aboard the school-ship HMS Conway in preparation for a naval career. His apprenticeship was disastrous—he was classified as a Distressed British Seaman after a voyage around Cape Horn—and he soon left the ship. Arrangements were then made for him to join another ship in New York. But John had other plans: he deserted ship vowing “to be a writer, come what might.”

At seventeen John was living as a vagrant in America. He found work as a bar hand, and later secured employment at a carpet factory. Thinking that journalism might allow him to write for a living, he returned to England in 1897. His first volume of poetry, Salt-Water Ballads, was published in 1902, but it was not until the publication of The Everlasting Mercy in 1911 that he made his mark on the literary scene. The success of his second book was followed by the publication of several long narrative poems.

With the outbreak of the Great War, John became an orderly at a hospital in France. He also took charge of a motorboat ambulance service at Gallipoli in 1915. After the Allied failure there, John visited America and undertook a series of lectures in support of the war effort, which the government appreciated. After the war, he continued to write. He began to be not just popular but beloved.
In 1930 John was appointed Poet Laureate of the U.K., a post some had thought would go to Rudyard Kipling. Five years later he was awarded the Order of Merit. Although his position did not require it, John took being Poet Laureate seriously, turning out a remarkable amount of verse in the 37 years he spent in the position.  John died in 1967, and his ashes were interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.  (Source: nybooks.com)