Up to this time, Masefield had been driving himself to write book reviews, novels and plays while continuing his journalistic work, and his poetic abilities seemed to have died. Just prior to writing "The Everlasting Mercy,� Masefield had been depressed, and on a spring day in 1911, after a long snowy winter, he set out for a walk into the woods. He apparently discovered some primroses, and whle admiring their beauty, Masefield reported that he heard a voice saying, "The spring is beginning." There was no one else anywhere nearby, and Masefield believed the voice to be of supernatural origin.

Several weeks later, again enjoying the natural beauty of the woodlands around him and taking delight in the springing forth of life in the new season, Masefield, while on a walk, stepped over a fence. As he did so, he reported that "Instantly the poem appeared to me in its complete form, with every detail distinct; the opening lines pured out upon the page as fast as I could write them down." This poem, �The Everlasting Mercy,� was published in the English Review in October of 1911, and in the words of Frank Swinnerton, a critic at the time of poem�s release, wrote in his book, �The Georgian Literary Scene� regarding The Everlasting Mercy, "It was read, declaimed, interrupted and discussed with a sort of inflamed fever of controversy such as, in the case of poetry, I cannot in memory match."