Читать книгу The Letters of Charles Sorley - Charles Hamilton Sorley - Страница 9

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I am late in writing this letter because I borrowed from one of the ushers a poem by Masefield called The Everlasting Mercy. It is about the length of The Widow in the Bye Street, and just as engrossing and gripping, but the story is much less pessimistic, and there are bits of poetry in it of a far finer kind than any in the Widow. The first seventy pages are just like The Widow in the Bye Street, with just as much power and grip and sordidness; but the last twenty pages are poetry of an entirely different range, containing outbursts which are about as lofty and about as pure poetry as anything I have ever read. The whole is a story of the reformation of a criminal, and is the only story on that hackneyed theme that I have ever found in the least convincing. And though there are obvious faults in the poem, it is wonderfully convincing, absorbing and inspiring; and if Boots, the Union, or your purse can rise to it, I advise you immediately to beg, borrow or buy The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield. It takes about an hour to read—unless you find, as I did, that it is bed time already and that you are reading it for the fifth time on end, and that prep., letters and everything have been thrown to the wind.

The above letter is the first of many discussing and replying to criticisms upon Mr Masefield’s poems, which at that time absorbed him. The other letters are omitted, as his enthusiasm is fully expressed in the paper on pp. 24 ff.