John Masefield.—­Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse.  Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire.  He was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea.  These varied experiences contributed color and vividness to his narrative verse.

[Illustration:  JOHN MASEFIELD.]

He has written several long narrative poems on unromantic subjects. Dauber (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic.  This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand.  Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist’s ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous experiences while rounding Cape Horn. Dauber exhibits the poet’s power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes.  This poem, like most of Masefield’s long narrative poems, is a story of human failure,—­a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in its pessimistic moods.

A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield’s short lyrics, notably in Laugh and be Merry, Roadways, The Seekers, and Being Her Friend.  In Laugh and be Merry, the song is almost triumphant:—­

“Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.
* * * * *
Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord."[5]

Masefield’s fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible visions.  He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull mediocrity.  Sometimes his verse is merely plain rimed prose, but again it becomes vigorous, picturesque, and vivid in description, as in the following lines from Dauber:—­

“...then the snow Whirled all about, dense, multitudinous cold, Mixed with the wind’s one devilish thrust and shriek Which whiffled out men’s tears, deafened, took hold, Flattening the flying drift against the cheek."[6]

Wilfred W. Gibson.—­Gibson, who was born in Hexham in 1878, sings of the struggling oppressed work-a-day people:—­

  “Crouched in the dripping dark
  With steaming shoulders stark
  The man who hews the coal to feed the fires."[7]

His poem, The Machine, awakens sympathy for the printer of Christmas story books and reveals Gibson as the twentieth-century Thomas Hood of The Song of the Shirt.  One of the most richly human of his poems is The Crane, the story of the seamstress mother and her lame boy.  His realistic volume of verse bearing the significant title, Daily Bread (1910), contains a number of narrative poems, which endeavor to set to music the “one measure” to which all life moves,—­the earning of daily bread.