'When the rising moon was a copper disc and the sea was a strip of steel,
We dumped him down to the swaying weeds ten fathoms beneath the keel'

The poems work with the full spectrum of a sailor's life, the movement, the longing and the even the superstition and folklore of a life at sea. Picture the author in a little cabin, far out on deep water. Shimmering waves and flickering lamplight as John Masefield began to reach out and call us all to go to sea, more surely than any siren or mermaid. In the author's own words

'I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.'

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