John Masefield

Lollingdon Downs and other poems

So I have known this life,

Beads on string

The rosary metaphor: days are beads, self is the string holding them together. He's asking what unifies a life—what makes scattered experiences into a coherent identity.

These beads of coloured days,
This self the string.

Beads on string

The rosary metaphor: days are beads, self is the string holding them together. He's asking what unifies a life—what makes scattered experiences into a coherent identity.

What is this thing?
Not beauty; no; not greed,
O, not indeed;
Not all, though much;
Its colour is not such.
It has no eyes to see,
It has no ears,

Red hour's war

Red = blood, passion, violence. A life reduced to one hour of struggle followed by grief. Masefield saw WWI firsthand; this brutal compression reflects war's acceleration of experience.

It is a red hour's war
Followed by tears.

Red hour's war

Red = blood, passion, violence. A life reduced to one hour of struggle followed by grief. Masefield saw WWI firsthand; this brutal compression reflects war's acceleration of experience.

It is an hour of time,
An hour of road,

Flesh is its goad

A goad is a spiked stick for driving cattle. Physical need—hunger, desire, pain—is what drives human action forward along life's road.

Flesh is its goad,
Yet, in the sorrowing lands,
Women and men take hands.
O earth, give us the corn,
Come rain, come sun,
We men who have been born
Have tasks undone.
Out of this earth
Comes the thing birth,

Thing birth

Deliberate awkwardness: not 'birth itself' but 'the thing birth'—making birth strange, mechanical. It's a process, not a miracle. Matches 'thing unguessed, unwon' two lines later.

Thing birth

Deliberate awkwardness: not 'birth itself' but 'the thing birth'—making birth strange, mechanical. It's a process, not a miracle. Matches 'thing unguessed, unwon' two lines later.

The thing unguessed, unwon.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Catechism Structure

The poem opens with a question-and-answer pattern borrowed from religious instruction. 'What is this thing?' gets a series of negations—not beauty, not greed—before any positive definition. This is the via negativa, the theological method of defining God by what He isn't.

But Masefield isn't defining God. He's defining life itself, and the negations pile up because life resists easy categorization. The repeated 'not' and 'O, not indeed' sound like someone correcting a naive student. Life isn't the transcendent thing (beauty) or the base thing (greed), though it contains both.

CONTEXT Masefield was born working-class in 1878, went to sea at 15, and spent years in manual labor before becoming Poet Laureate. His poetry consistently rejects Romantic idealization in favor of physical, earthbound reality. When he says 'Flesh is its goad', he means it literally—the body's needs drive human action, not abstract ideals.

The shift at 'Yet, in the sorrowing lands, / Women and men take hands' is crucial. After all the negations and violence, human connection appears as the one positive. Not romantic love—just 'take hands', the simplest gesture of solidarity. This is what survives the 'red hour's war.'

Agricultural Time vs. Psychological Time

The final stanza switches from metaphysical questions to agricultural imperative: 'O earth, give us the corn.' This isn't metaphor—Masefield is invoking the actual cycle of planting and harvest that governed rural life.

'Come rain, come sun' compresses the growing season into four words. Notice the acceptance: not 'give us sun' but 'come rain, come sun'—whatever weather comes, the work continues. The phrase 'tasks undone' refers both to individual mortality (we die before finishing our work) and to generational continuity (the next generation picks up where we left off).

The poem's final image—'the thing birth, / The thing unguessed, unwon'—returns to that strange, distancing language. Birth is reduced to a 'thing,' something produced by earth like corn. 'Unguessed' means unpredictable; 'unwon' means it can't be earned or achieved, only received. This is the opposite of the Victorian idea of life as a moral proving ground.

Masefield is arguing that life's meaning isn't found in beauty, ambition, or even understanding. It's found in physical continuity: the earth produces corn, corn sustains bodies, bodies produce more bodies. The 'beads of coloured days' don't add up to a grand narrative—they're just days, strung together by the biological fact of being alive.