_The Widow in the Bye Street._ Its opening lines have the
much-in-little so characteristic of Chaucer.

Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
She rose from ragged mattress before sun
And stitched all day until her eyes were red,
And had to stitch, because her man was dead.

This is one of the best narrative poems in modern literature. It rises
from calm to the fiercest and most tumultuous passions that usurp the
throne of reason. Love, jealousy, hate, revenge, murder, succeed in
cumulative force. Then the calm of unmitigated and hopeless woe
returns, and we leave the widow in a solitude peopled only with
memories. It is melodrama elevated into poetry. The mastery of the
artist is shown in the skill with which he avoids the quagmire of
sentimentality. We can easily imagine what form this story would take
under the treatment of many popular writers. But although constantly
approaching the verge, Mr. Masefield never falls in. He has known so
much sentimentality, not merely in books and plays, but in human
beings, that he understands how to avoid it. Furthermore, he is
steadied by seeing so plainly the weaknesses of his characters, just
as a great nervous specialist gains in poise by observing his
patients. And perhaps our author feels the sorrows of the widow too
deeply to talk about them with any conventional affectation.

I should like to find some one who, without much familiarity with the
fixed stars in English literature, had read _The Daffodil