Explore the poem

In this poem the speaker imagines a whole history of cargo ships carrying different things across the seas. Each verse gives us a different kind of ship in a different time in history and a different place, with different cargo.

Some of the words might be unfamiliar when you first read the poem. Don’t worry too much about their meanings or whether you say them correctly, just enjoy their sounds and the exotic impression they create. How are the words and pictures in the final verse different?

Now you have tasted the words for yourself, you might like to listen to this video of the actress Joanna Lumley reading the poem. She also explains what a quinquireme is.

Think about the enormous container ships on the world’s oceans today – can you write an extra verse for this poem which creates a vivid picture of modern cargoes?

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’.