Sonnet Analysis: John Masefield

I just ran across this sonnet that I think deserves some attention. So I'm going to give it that attention. John Masefield's "Life" was published in 1916 in The Atlantic.

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells
Which work they know not why, which never halt;
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells.
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
A world which uses me as I use them.
Nor do I know which end or which begin,
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
So like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave
Or the great sun comes north; this myriad I
Tingle, not knowing how, yet wondering why.

Triumphs:
This is a poem about the uncertainty of what it is to live and to be alive, and the wonder that attends on that uncertainty. That effect is powerfully heightened by the words Masefield uses: his diction is heightened, and the Latinate words flow into and through the poem, increasing the sense of awe. The pseudo-Petrarchan organization of the poem (divided into octave and sestet, though the octave rhymes abbacddc rather than abbaabba) and the powerful move out from the individual's self-conception to the individual in the world at the turn also works extremely well to cultivate and express the sense of awe the narrator feels. The syntax of the sestet is also effective in creating that wonder: the sentences feel open-ended, and substantives like "the vast" and "this myriad" leave open the definition of the antecedents, opening the poem up to the enormous variety of the world. Finally, the sound-patterning is simply gorgeous in the mouth.

Imperfections:
That very openness can seem indecisive or highfalutin: "I answer to the vast" is a very difficult line to carry off without sounding pretentious, and, much as I like this poem, I am far from certain that Masefield does so. "The full moon comes swimming from her cave" is susceptible to the same problem, and also seems to dip the poem out of the modern scientific wonder that the rest of the poem invokes back to a more ancient sort of wonder, the mythological belief that the moon spends the day in a cave, and while that wonder is legitimate too, it seems retrograde within the context of the rest of the poem. And the same is true of the "great sun coming north." They're a little overdone, but the rest of the poem is beautiful enough to bring them along with it.