...it's what's-his-name. Masefield. John Masefield, Poet Laureate
of England, 1930-1967. This pub, in Wirral, Merseyside, near Liverpool, was
intended to honor the poet, who trained to become a merchant seaman along the
Mersey. But the local punters thought they recognized you-know-who and started
calling the place "the Adolf." I mean, honestly. Hasn't hurt
business, though. Quite the contrary.
Masefield was a fine old-fashioned journeyman-poet who led a
fine old-fashioned Victorian kind of knockabout existence, sailing aboard
freighters to the South China Sea, living down-and-out in New York, dodging the
gunfire in the trenches of WW1. And going on to become a highly successful and
respected novelist and poet. His best-known poem is probably "Sea-Fever,"
which I won't reproduce here, given the ease of accessibility to such things in
these Internet times. But if you don't know it, I urge you to read it.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of that ease of accessibility, here's a little
verse that was discovered after his death:
Let no
religious rite be done or read
In any
place for me when I am dead,
But burn
my body into ash, and scatter
The ash
in secret into running water,
Or on
the windy down, and let none see;
And then
thank God that there's an end of me.
