Posted- John Masefield

 

Dream after dream I see the wrecks that lie

Unknown of men, unmarked upon charts.

Known of the flat-fish with the withered eye

And seen by women with their aching hearts.

 

World-wide the scattering is of those fair ships

That trod the billow tops till out of sight:

The cuttle mumbles them with horny lips,

The shells of the sea insects crust them white.

 

In silence and in dimness and in greenness

Among the indistinct and leathery leaves

Of fruitless life they lie among the cleanness.

Fish glide and flit, slow under-movement heaves:

 

But no sound penetrates, not even the lunge

Of live ships passing, nor the gannet’s plunge.  

  Exercise:

1.      What does the poetic persona see in his dreams?

2.      Why are the things he sees “unknown to men, unmarked upon charts”?

3.       How do the women see them? Why do they see them?

II

4.      What is the poet trying to tell us through the last two lines of the 2^nd stanza?

III

5.      Who or what are “they” in stanza 3?

6.      Why are “they”’s lives fruitless?

VI

7.      Paraphrase the last stanza.

8.      What message do you think the writer is trying to give the reader through the last stanza?