This week’s choice is “The Word” by John Masefield.
My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
John Masefield (1878—1967)
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love’s refinèd gold,
May love’s gold coin be current with us still.
Poem 359. The Word
My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love’s refinèd gold,
May love’s gold coin be current with us still.
May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
In the dear March of a most sacred year.
May what we are be all we might have been,
And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
In our love’s acre, comrade, till the end.
And may we find when ended is the page
Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.
Masefield is generally remembered for “Sea Fever”, but he wrote a lot of poems that were not maritime in nature, and this is a rather good one in my opinion. I found it in a book of his Collected Poems that I bought from Barter Books in Alnwick, and it seems to continue the theme from last week.
It is a sonnet with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, so it follows Shakespeare’s format. The poem itself celebrates a loving relationship. The narrator hopes that in old age, he and his beloved will love each other as much as they do now. The countless days that may pass between now and then shall serve only to heighten the intensity of their love, and his beloved’s beauty will be then as it was when he first was struck dumb “In the dear March of a most sacred year.”
He prays that they will have found the contentment they desire and fulfilled their desires while still hoping that they can find new ways to intensify their feelings towards each other, and that when the final page of their story on Earth is reached, that their passing will lead to further destinations on their souls’ joint pilgrimage.
I like the imagery of this poem: “love’s refinèd gold” and “love’s gold coin” draw a parallel through the high value of gold to the higher value of love, the idea of discovering new ways to love expressed as harvesting sheafs of corn in “love’s acre” and the thought that Death might only be a temporary stopover point on a long journey to our souls’ destination. I like the mental picture of the two old people “tottering down the hill,” each holding the other’s hand. For a short poem, there’s a lot of lovely phrases: “the vanished days”, “a most sacred year” to mean the moment when love first dawned, and “May what we are be all we might have been” which takes some thought to understand properly, rather like Bilbo Baggins’s statement in his birthday party speech which causes some head-scratching amongst his fellow hobbits:
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
There are a few performances on YouTube but the best in my opinion is by poetryreincarnations, though the animation of Wilfred Pickles’s face is a little odd.