It was not until he published _The Everlasting Mercy_ (1911) that he became famous. Followed quickly by those remarkable long narrative poems, _The Widow in the Bye Street_ (1912), _Dauber_ (1912), and _The Daffodil Fields_ (1913), there is in all of these that peculiar blend of physical exulting and spiritual exaltation that is so striking, and so typical of Masefield. Their very rudeness is lifted to a plane of religious intensity. (See Preface.) Pictorially, Masefield is even more forceful. The finest moment in _The Widow in the Bye Street_ is the portrayal of the mother alone in her cottage; the public-house scene and the passage describing the birds following the plough are the most intense touches in _The Everlasting Mercy_. Nothing more vigorous and thrilling than the description of the storm at sea in _Dauber_ has appeared in current literature.
The war, in which Masefield served with the Red Cross in France and on the Gallipoli peninsula (of which campaign he wrote a study for the government), softened his style; _Good Friday and Other Poems_ (1916) is as restrained and dignified a collection as that of any of his contemporaries. _Reynard the Fox_ (1919) is the best of his new manner with a return of the old vivacity.
Masefield has also written several novels of which _Multitude and Solitude_ (1909) is the most outstanding; half a dozen plays, ranging from the classical solemnity of _Pompey the Great_ to the hot and racy _Tragedy of Nan_; and one of the freshest, most creative critiques of _Shakespeare_ (1911) in the last generation.
Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,-- Rather the scorned--the rejected--the men hemmed in with the spears;
The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.
Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.
Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad, The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.