Today’s Poem of the Day, “Sea Fever” by John Masefield (1878–1967), has long been a staple of children’s anthologies. It’s the quintessence of the traditional “boy’s poem,” with its call to a life spent in the buffeting salt wind, the thrilling toss of the sea, and the hail-and-well-met company of other footloose rovers.  

Masefield himself went to sea at the age of thirteen, after an unhappy period at school, as much to cure himself of bookishness as to learn a sailor’s trade. What he chiefly learned, in three years aboard the HMS Conway, was that life at sea allowed him ample time to read and write. The older seamen, spinning their yarns, convinced him that he wanted to be like them: a storyteller.  

Although Masefield made several more sea voyages, living the sort of vagrant life “Sea Fever” enshrines, by the early 1900s he was settling into family life on a series of farms, where he kept bees, goats, and poultry. He had also begun to write and publish poems. His long career included nearly forty books of poetry, twenty-five works of fiction, twelve plays, and fourteen works of nonfiction, memoir, and literary criticism. He served as British Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967.  
 
One of Masefield’s longstanding literary enthusiasms was for poetry spoken aloud. In 1923 he founded Oxford Recitations, analogous to the contemporary Poetry Out Loud program for American high-school students. The stated purpose of Masefield’s competition was “to discover good speakers of verse and to encourage ‘the beautiful speaking of poetry.’” His own famous 1902 poem, “Sea Fever,” is precisely the sort of poem that offers itself for “beautiful speaking.” Its heptameter quatrains, full of the lilt and lift of anapests and dactyls, roll stirringly off the tongue even as they evoke the distant, but longed-for, roll of the open sea.  

Sea-Fever 
by John Masefield 

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, 
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; 
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, 
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. 

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide 
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; 
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, 
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. 

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, 
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; 
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, 
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.