As Mr. Masefield's narratives take us back to Chaucer, so his
_Sonnets_ (1916) take us back to the great Elizabethan sequences.
Whether or not Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his sonnets is
impossible to determine. Wordsworth thought he did, Browning thought
quite otherwise. But these sonnets of our poet are undoubtedly
subjective; no one without the necessary information would guess them
to come from the author of _The Everlasting Mercy._ They reveal
what has always been--through moving accidents by flood and field--the
master passion of his mind and heart, the worship of Beauty. The
entire series illustrates a tribute to Beauty expressed in the first
one--"Delight in her made trouble in my mind." This mental disturbance
is here the spur to composition. They are experiments in relative,
meditative, speculative poetry; and while they contain some memorable
lines, and heighten one's respect for the dignity and sincerity of
their author's temperament, they are surely not so successful as his
other work. They are not clearly articulate. Instead of the perfect
expression of perfect thoughts--a gift enjoyed only by
Shakespeare--they reveal the extreme difficulty of metrically voicing
his "trouble." It is in a way like the music of the _Liebestod_.
He is struggling to say what is in his mind, he approaches it, falls
away comes near again, only to be finally baffled.

In 1918 Mr. Masefield returned to battle, murder and sudden death in
the romantic poem _Rosas_. This is an exciting tale told in over
a hundred stanzas, and it is safe to say that any one who reads the
first six lines will read to the end without moving in his chair.
Although this is the latest in publication of our poet's works, it
sounds as if it were written years ago, before he had attained the
mastery so evident in _The Widow in the Bye Street_. It will add
little to the author's reputation.