John Masefield

Bill

He lay dead on the cluttered deck and stared at the cold skies,
With never a friend to mourn for him nor a hand to close his eyes:
'Bill, he's dead,' was all they said; 'he's dead, 'n' there he lies.'

seven bells

Seven bells in a four-hour watch means 30 minutes before the watch ends. The mate wants Bill disposed of before shift change—pure administrative convenience.

The mate came forrard at seven bells and spat across the rail:
'Just lash him up wi' some holystone in a clout o' rotten sail,

holystone in a clout

A holystone is sandstone used to scrub decks—heavy enough to sink a body. A 'clout' is a rag or scrap. They're wrapping Bill in literal garbage.

'N', rot ye, get a gait on ye, ye're slower'n a bloody snail!'
When the rising moon was a copper disc and the sea was a strip of steel,

ten fathom beneath the keel

A fathom is six feet. Sixty feet down is shallow for ocean burial—Bill barely makes it past the ship's draft before hitting the weeds.

We dumped him down to the swaying weeds ten fathom beneath the keel.
'It's rough about Bill,' the fo'c's'le said, 'we'll have to stand his wheel.'

stand his wheel

Taking turns at the ship's wheel (steering). The crew's only concern is who covers Bill's work shifts. Not 'mourn' or 'miss'—just logistics.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Dialect Is Doing Work

Masefield drops the mate's speech into heavy nautical dialect—'forrard,' 'wi',' 'n','—while keeping the narrator's voice in standard English. This isn't flavor. The mate's brutality comes through his language: 'rot ye' as casual curse, 'get a gait on ye' (move faster) barked at men handling a corpse, 'slower'n a bloody snail' while they're literally preparing a burial.

The crew's single line of dialogue—'It's rough about Bill'—is the only spoken sympathy in the poem, and it's immediately undercut by 'we'll have to stand his wheel.' Even their mourning is transactional. The fo'c's'le (forecastle, crew quarters) speaks as a collective unit, not individuals. No one loved Bill enough to use first person.

Notice what's in standard English: the narrator's descriptions of the sky, moon, and sea. The poem reserves its only beauty for the natural world. The humans get dialect, curses, and bureaucracy.

Masefield's Merchant Marine Years

Masefield spent 1894-1897 as a teenage apprentice on merchant ships, then deserted in New York rather than return to sea. He knew this world. 'Bill' (1902) comes from his first poetry collection, written while he was still processing those years—he was 24, only five years removed from deck work.

The holystone detail is pure insider knowledge. Landlubbers wouldn't know that the heavy sandstone blocks used to scrub decks made cheap ballast for sea burials. The seven bells timing is similarly specific: the mate wants the body gone before the next watch rotation, probably to avoid paperwork or questions from a new shift.

Masefield became Poet Laureate in 1930, but he made his name writing about the brutality of working-class maritime life. This isn't romanticized 'sea fever'—this is what he saw at sixteen: men dying unmourned, bodies dumped with deck-scrubbing stones, officers treating corpses as scheduling problems.