From this point of view "Trinity Sunday" is the most important poem in the book. It records an experience which the mystic of another age would have called a revelation, and which he would have apprehended through the medium of religious emotion. But this poet attains to her ultimate vision through the phenomena of the real world, apprehended in terms of the ideal. The warm breath of Spring, rich with scent and sound of the teeming earth, stirs it to awakening. But though she is walking in familiar Cambridge with, characteristically, the scene and time exactly placed: though friendly faces pass and cordial voices give a greeting, all that suddenly shrivels at the touch of the wild earth spirit. Space and time curl away in fold after fold; and with them pass successive forms of strange life immensely remote. But even while reality thus terribly unfolds, it is perceived to be the _stuff of the world's live brain_; to have existence only in idea. And the fens were not. (For fens are dreams Dreamt by a race long dead; And the earth is naught, and the sun but seems: And so those who know have said.) Thus the facts of science have gone to the making of this poem, as well as the theories of an idealist philosophy. It is through them both that imagination takes the forward leap. But neither the one nor the other can avail to utter the revelation; and even the poet's remarkable gift of expression can only suffice to suggest the awfulness of it. So veil beyond veil illimitably lifted: And I saw the world's naked face, Before, reeling and baffled and blind, I drifted Back within the bounds of space. _John Masefield_ There is one sense at least in which Mr Masefield is the most important figure amongst contemporary poets. For he has won the popular ear, he has cast the poetic spell further than any of his compeers, and it has been given to him to lure the multitudinous reader of magazines--that wary host which is usually stampeded by the sight of a page of verse. Now I know that there are cultured persons to whom this fact of uncritical appreciation is an offence, and to them a writer bent upon purely scientific criticism would be compelled to yield certain points. But they would be mainly on finicking questions, as an occasional lapse from fineness in thought or form, an incidental banality of word or phrase; or a lack of delicate effects of rhyme and metre. And the whole business would amount in the end to little more than a petulant complaint; an impertinent grumble that Mr Masefield happens to be himself and not, let us say, Mr Robert Bridges; that his individual genius has carved its own channels and that, in effect, the music of the sea or the mountain torrent does not happen to be the same thing as the plash of a fountain in a valley.