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; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
What we love about this poem…
The rhythm of the poem mimics the rise and fall of waves, making it one of the most irresistible poems to read aloud—try it! Or you can hear Masefield himself recite it here. Notice how he ends each stanza with an unexpected rise in intonation.
This rhythm is called ‘heptameter’ due to its seven metrical ‘feet’ in each line of verse. The seven feet give fourteen syllables, and the effect is mesmerizing: long, lilting lines and rich, assonant imagery (‘the wind’s like a whetted knife’). It’s no surprise that this poem has often been set to music.
It’s also an example of a poem that readers actually changed through their reading of it. When it was originally published in 1902, those first lines of each stanza read ‘I must down to the seas again.’ Almost immediately, readers instinctively added ‘go’, an improvement that Masefield himself embraced.
Finally, we love the way Masefield brings the poem to its moving close with that unexpected term ‘trick’, which in this context of sea-faring means the 'watch’ that sailors took. Life is a ‘long trick’, full of both adventure and watchfulness, and the poet just hopes that it will end in ‘a quiet sleep.’
About the Author
John Masefield (1878-1967) was an English writer whose twin passions were the sea and literature. He left school and became a sailor for many years, spending all his free time reading and writing, and eventually abandoned ship in New York, worked in a carpet factory for a time, and began gradually making his career as a writer. He held the position of British Poet Laureate for the last 37 years of his life.
To read alongside…
In the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick, the American writer Herman Melville likewise captured the overwhelming pull of the sea. You can read those paragraphs here.
But the sea means starkly different things in different contexts. As the Nobel Prize-winning West Indian poet Derek Walcott put it in ‘The Sea is History,’ the sea houses the collective trauma of slavery:
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.
You might also enjoy The Deep by Rivers Solomon, a fantasy text that really speaks to the sea and the trauma of transatlantic slavery travel that Walcott’s poem references.
And before you go, here’s a fun fact:
The ‘whale’s way’ in the last stanza is an Old English kenning for the sea -- Hwælweg -- used in many Old English poems, famously in The Seafarer, a poem in the 10th-Century book of mixed texts in English. For example, Ezra Pound’s adaptation of this section of The Seafarer reads:
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock, My mood ’mid the mere-flood, Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide. On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me, Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer, Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly, O'er tracks of ocean.
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