The half-burnt moon her starry trackway rode.
Then the first Are was lighted in the town,
And the first carter stacked his early load.
Upon the farm's drawn blinds the morning glowed;
And down the valley, with little clucks and rills,
The dancing waters danced by dancing daffodils.

But if, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Masefield in the composition
of _The Daffodil Fields_ followed the metre and the manner of
Wordsworth in _Resolution and Independence_, in the story itself
he challenges Tennyson's _Enoch Arden_. Whether he meant to
challenge it, I do not know; but the comparison is unescapable.
Tennyson did not invent the story, and any poet has the right to use
the material in his own fashion. Knowing Mr. Masefield from _The
Everlasting Mercy_ and _The Widow in the Bye Street_, it would
have been safe to prophesy in advance that his own Enoch would not
show the self-restraint practised by the Tennysonian hero. Reserve and
restraint were the trump cards of the Typical Victorian, just as the
annihilation of all reserve is a characteristic of the
twentieth-century artist. In the _Idylls of the King_, the
parting of Guinevere and Arthur was what interested Tennyson; the
poets of today would of course centre attention on the parting of
Guinevere and Lancelot, and like so many "advances," they would in
truth be only going back to old Malory.

"Neither in the design nor in the telling did, or could, _Enoch
Arden_ come near the artistic truth of _The Daffodil Fields_,"
says Professor Quiller-Couch, of Cambridge. I am not entirely sure of
the truth of this very positive statement. Each is a rural poem; the
characters are simple; the poetic accompaniment supplied by the