Background to the poem

Masefield’s skilfully rhymed sonnet is a closely observed picture of a partridge shoot. A ‘covey’ is a small flock of partridges and the ‘nosing pointers’ are the gundogs that help the hunters locate and flush out the well‑camouflaged, ground‑nesting birds.

The hunting action is condensed by Masefield into one succinct line at the end of the first verse, which describes the flapping of the wings of the partridges and the flash of the shotguns. The second verse, with its confident use of alliteration and assonance, neatly captures the immediate aftermath of the volley of shots. Dogs are praised, while some of the birds are dead–‘shot clean’– and some wounded. Masefield contrasts the plight of the shot birds carried home in a sack full of rabbits and pigeons with a time before the hunt when the covey would have enjoyed ‘strong or gliding flight’. As darkness falls, described in the evocative line, ‘when the planet lamps the coming night’, the poem leaves us with a glimpse of the ‘survivors’ and a haunting image of the ‘darkness’ hearing them call.

About John Masefield

John Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967. He was a versatile poet, novelist and journalist, and wrote and lectured for the government during the First World War after supporting the war effort as a hospital orderly in France.

Masefield went to sea at a young age but saw no future as a sailor and on one voyage to America deserted ship in New York. He read insatiably, and his poems began to be published in periodicals, followed by a first collection of poetry when he was twenty‑four. Novels followed, and narrative poems, so that by 1912, when he was awarded a major literary prize, Masefield was a successful and well‑known writer.

Nearly a hundred years before ‘Poetry By Heart’, Masefield organized the Oxford Recitations in the 1920s, an annual contest designed to ‘discover good speakers of verse’ and to ‘encourage the beautiful speaking of verse’.

Read more about John Masefield in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography