Selected Public Domain Poems

John Masefield's poetry pulses with the salt-thrust and starlight of the open sea. Written during his tenure as Britain's Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, these selected verses move between the crashing romance of maritime life and the quiet metaphysical depths beneath it. Sea-Fever captures the irresistible pull toward distant horizons, while other poems turn inward toward mortality, faith, and the strange currents that carry us toward our destinies. Masefield wrote verse meant to be spoken aloud, and its rhythms carry the roll of waves and the creak of rigging. These are poems for anyone who has ever felt the world calling them somewhere they cannot name, and wondered what lies beyond the next headland. They endure because they give language to longing itself, that restless hunger that keeps sailors at sea and dreamers looking at the sky.