John Masefield

A Ballad of John Silver

Nautical specificity

Masefield uses precise ship terminology (schooner-rigged, rakish hull, taffrail, poop, fo'c'sle) to establish authenticity. He's not writing fantasy—he's drawing from actual naval architecture and sailor culture he knew firsthand.

We were schooner-rigged and rakish,
With a long and lissome hull,
And we flew the pretty colours of the crossbones and the skull;
We'd a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore,
And we sailed the Spanish Water in the happy days of yore.
We'd a long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,
We had each a brace of pistols and a cutlass at the hip;
It's a point which tells against us, and a fact to be deplored,

Casual brutality

Notice the tone shift: 'It's a point which tells against us, and a fact to be deplored' uses bureaucratic understatement for mass murder. The pirate narrator is wryly acknowledging his crimes as social impropriety rather than moral horror.

But we chased the goodly merchant-men and laid their ships aboard.

Grotesque realism

The specific images—'dead men fouled the scuppers,' 'paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people's brains'—move beyond romantic piracy into actual naval violence. Masefield served at sea and writes what he knows.

Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains,
And the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people's brains,
She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank.
And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.
O! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop)
We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken coop;

Absurdist humor

'The absent chicken coop' is the poem's strangest line. Drowning sailors lamenting livestock (not their lives) creates dark comedy that undercuts any heroic pirate mythology. The detail is too specific to be accidental.

Then, having washed the blood away, we'd little else to do

Rhythmic celebration

The hornpipe dancing and fiddle music lines use rollicking meter that makes atrocity feel festive. Masefield's technique—upbeat rhythm paired with brutal content—forces readers to feel the disconnect between how pirates experienced their crimes and how we judge them.

Than to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to.
O! the fiddle on the fo'c'sle, and the slapping naked soles,
And the genial "Down the middle, Jake, and curtsey when she rolls!"
With the silver seas around us and the pale moon overhead,
And the look-out not a-looking and his pipe-bowl glowing red.
Ah! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played,
All have since been put a stop to by the naughty Board of Trade;

Nostalgia's target

'The naughty Board of Trade' is the villain here, not morality. The poem mourns the end of piracy as lost freedom, not lost evil. Masefield's sympathy lies with the outlaw life itself, not its victims.

The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,
A little south the sunset in the islands of the Blest.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Masefield's Pirate Elegy: Nostalgia Without Morality

This ballad doesn't condemn piracy—it mourns it. Masefield, who served in the merchant marine and later wrote extensively about seafaring life, treats the pirate era as a lost golden age. The poem's narrator speaks with genuine affection for 'the happy days of yore,' and the final stanza imagines the dead pirates resting 'in the islands of the Blest' as though they were heroes rather than murderers.

The crucial move is the tone of regret without guilt. The narrator admits to 'chasing the goodly merchant-men and laid their ships aboard,' but frames this as a 'point which tells against us' in the manner of a minor social embarrassment. This is the poem's central trick: Masefield makes us feel the pirate's perspective—the genuine joy of the hornpipe dance, the camaraderie, the freedom from law—while never letting us forget the violence underneath. The drowning sailors lamenting a chicken coop is grotesque precisely because it's funny, and we're forced to laugh at something obscene.

Masefield isn't endorsing piracy; he's capturing a historical moment when maritime outlaws experienced their own lives as adventure, not atrocity. The Board of Trade emerges as the real enemy because it represents the end of that freedom, the bureaucratic taming of the sea.

Ballad Form as Moral Ambiguity

Masefield chose the ballad—a form associated with folk heroes and popular legend—specifically to capture how piracy lived in cultural memory. Ballads traditionally celebrate outlaws (Robin Hood, Jesse James), and this poem exploits that tradition. The regular meter, the repetitive rhyme scheme (AABBA), and the rollicking rhythm all create a celebratory mood that contradicts the content.

This formal choice is the poem's most sophisticated technique. By making atrocity sound festive, Masefield forces readers to experience the gap between how we think we should feel about pirates (moral disapproval) and how the ballad form makes us actually feel (exhilaration). The 'slapping naked soles' and 'genial' shipboard camaraderie are rendered in the same meter as the murder and looting. We can't separate the romance from the brutality because the form won't let us. This isn't accidental—it's Masefield teaching us that historical nostalgia always involves this moral collapse, that we sentimentalize the past by forgetting its victims.