CLM
In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.
Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell
Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.
If the grave’s gates could be undone,
She would not know her little son,
I am so grown. If we should meet
She would pass by me in the street,
Unless my soul’s face let her see
My sense of what she did for me.
What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?
What woman’s happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth’s releasing hell was reached.
What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will,
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
* * * *
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.
Headed tactfully by her initials only, John Masefield’s poem to his mother Caroline, née Parker, is among a number of poems more conventionally mourning an unnamed woman, gathered in his 1910 collection, Ballads and Poems. It was a period when Masefield, established as a poet by then, had decided to turn to prose. To quote from Philip W Errington’s introduction to a new edition of the Selected Poems, Masefield experienced “a very real blackness of despair” and noted “my work was not as I had hoped”. The five terse sestets of CLM express an un-guardedly personal perspective, and a sombre one. A reader unfamiliar with the biographical outlines might conclude from the remorseful tone that it was John’s birth that had caused his mother’s death. In fact he was six years old when she died giving birth to his sister.
The boy’s contented, rural Ledbury childhood was demolished. After the breakdown and death of his father that followed loss of Caroline, John lived with an uncle and aunt, had an unhappy experience of boarding school, and was then dispatched to a Mersey naval “school ship”, the Conway, in the hope that his reading habit would be cured. But his nautical training left him considerable time for reading, and, after further adventures, led to the publication in 1902 of Salt Water Ballads, his much-loved first collection.
Those early poems with their simple sea-shanty lilt, their ship-wise vocabulary and easy way with dialect still ring fresh, emotionally charged and distinctive. But as Dr Errington points out, there’s more to the poet than Cargoes and Sea-Fever. Masefield’s life (1878-1967) was a long one, the commitment to poetry recovered and sustained, despite his success in other genres, and the later duties of poet laureate. Navigated chronologically, his poetic vision grows increasingly serious and original. This isn’t fully explained by his verse-narrative writing, though he’s a fine and large-hearted storyteller. It’s a matter of humanity and generosity, qualities that permeate the shorter lyrics too, and enable his breadth of perception. Even his war poems are anti-romantic. He never forgets “the men hemmed in with the spears …”
In CLM the reconstruction of pregnancy is a brutal one for the woman: “I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir, / But through the death of some of her.” In stanza five, the doom-laden vision expands to female life in general. Are there any “happier parts” in it that could repay the mother “for all my mouthless body leeched / Ere Birth’s releasing hell was reached”? These lines evoke a hideous parasite, the only escape for its host through the experience of unimaginable (or once childishly imagined) horror. The second and third stanzas, though, have taken a different tone, as if softened by actual memories. The delicately imagined non-encounter of mother and son is particularly touching.
Masefield, of course, isn’t writing from the angle of the geneticist. A poet of our own age might point out that what made him a manand decided his sex was the fact that his father’s sperm had delivered a Y chromosome. (There’s more on the ever-fascinating topic of chromosomes here).
Masefield tells us something equally existential is going on “in the dark womb where I began” – the slow formation of a whole potential self, drawing nourishment from the self of the mother. Is there the hint of an idea that all this is extraordinary because a man’s life is weightier and more complex than a woman’s? That seems an ungenerous question in the light of the poem’s further development, its repeated assertions of guilt, the obsessive self-questioning, the final self-abasement.
A few minor stumbles persist for the reader. “Beauty,” one of Masefield’s favourite shorthand words, sounds a little tired on its first appearance. The separation by a set of asterisks of the last line of stanza six could seem melodramatic to some tastes (not mine!) The words “lust” and “roves” risk limiting “shame” to the sexual kind. But allow “lust” to include the lust for power, and that dimension richly expands the poem.
Masefield was ahead of his time in disclosing a complicated visceral response to his orphaning. His form and technique are traditional but fluidly deployed, giving him room to search for a woman he knew well, as loved children always know their mother, but could never know well enough. The adult-child must “knock at dusty doors to find / Her beauty dusty in the mind.” In what is said and unsaid, Masefield stirs the dust: his image of CLM becomes visible.
