I can’t decide whether I love or hate John Masefield‘s poem Sea Fever. I lean strongly towards love, though the poem has been repeated so many times and in so many places, that it is hard not to groan every time it is recited anew. Clichés often become clichés because they represent a fundamental truth. So it is with Sea Fever. You know the poem. The first lines are:
I must down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
and a star to steer her by…
I wonder what Masefield must have felt about Sea Fever. Did he have a love/hate relationship with it as well?
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