By DILIP KUMAR SEN, M.A.
(Santiniketan)
If we subscribe to Milton’s description of poetry
as simple and sensuous, the claim of William Henry Davies to a niche in the
House of Fame goes unchallenged. Born in 1870 at Newport, Monmouthshire, Davies
had a fascinating career. As a young man he left home and set sail for America.
Travelling as a stowaway on trains, he once missed his footing and lost a leg.
After many vicissitudes of fortune in the New World, he came back to England, with
his mind stuffed with many an experience, lived in common lodging houses, on
the fringe of the slums, and, like that other illustrious vagabond, Francis
Thompson, peddled laces in the London streets. Gradually he accumulated enough
money to publish a volume of poems. This he distributed by post among the
eminent men of the day. A covering letter asked the recipient, very civilly, if
he required a half-crown book of verses; if not, would he return the book! “The
educated insolence” of Bernard Shaw at once detected that the author was a real
poet and he did much to popularize Davies by writing a preface to his charming
autobiography.
In an age of restless experiments, Davies is not
after new experiences, new expressions and new metrical effects. Absolute
simplicity and deep sincerity are the two chief characteristics of his verse.
His poetry is remarkable for clarity, for freshness of vision, for exquisite
and individual imagery. What is more remarkable is that he seems to have no
modern or ancient affiliation,–neither is he a derivative poet, nor does he
bring to bear upon his poetry a scholarly temperament. He is a born poet,
‘lisping in numbers’ because ‘the numbers came’ to him. His natural gifts of
feeling and observation stood him in good stead when he undertook to weave the
endless wonderfulness of his life into the tapestry of his poetry. He seems to
show no concern for the miraculous scientific knowledge of the intensely
interesting modern times. No intellectualism mars the flow of this limpid spring,–so
free, so unconcerned, yet so resolute; classical allusions are few and
scientific jargons and political catch-words are conspicuous by their absence.
Davies does not feel at home in “the dust and din
and steam of town”. He longs for, and feels content in, placid rural spots,
flooded by the influences of the fields. Like Hardy, he seems to look askance
at modern civilisation, which has extolled the town at the cost of the village.
The larger air of rural life is beautifully caught and represented in glowing
hues in his poetry. Here, in this delicious atmosphere, he does not hear
children crying for food, nor does he find any woman white with care. In the
city, on the other hand, misery and destitution are writ large, and behind the
well laid-out parks a beautiful statues lurk squalor and poverty. Drops of
compassion well up from his susceptible heart–that “fountain of sweet tears”,
but as he can do little to dispel the encircling gloom of despair and
desolation, he turns instinctively to the life in the backwoods.
His poetry gives us an ethereal vision of natural
beauty and a splendid glimpse of human life as it might be, quickened and
sweetened by the sun and the wind and the rain and by fellowship with all the
other forms of life. This is the vision which in these sleek and insipid days
we are in need of–and this is where Davies stands apart from almost all his
contemporaries. “The chief difference between Hardy and Davies as worshippers
of nature is that, while the former seeks persistently in nature for analogies
to compel attention to the ten thousand suffering faces of mankind and the
‘long drip of human tears’, the latter flies to nature for solace and
forgetfulness, pursuing joy and eschewing sadness. The central fact in his
poetry is not that he seeks little more than externals but that he is grateful
to nature for hanging her lovely veil between his susceptibilities and the
world’s pain.” 1
Again, Davies does not preach like Meredith that to
ignore Earth is to deny the meaning of life and to follow Earth is to develop
in fullness. He reads no secret message in the scroll of Nature and he seeks no
spirit behind the phenomena of Nature. He does not try to reveal to man the
ways of Nature; rather he expresses in his poems his great joy in the impressions
of sight and sound and taste and scent. The simplicity and vastness of Nature
are fascinating to him and he dallies delicately with them, but he fights shy
of plangent litany and fervent rapture as noisy and something distasteful.
In his poems, we live in the open with the smell of
the earth in our nostrils. He is perfectly at home in the wild moors and watery
swamps and wild thickets, if he can sit there alone and count the oak trees one
by one. As Robert Lynd says in his Introduction to Methuen’s An Anthology of
Modern Verse, “To read him is to see with new eyes, to hear with new ears.
He invites us to a more intense experience of eye and ear than we have known
before. While De la Mare has the genius for making us look on lovely things as
though for the last time, Davies has a gift for making us look at them as if
for the first time.” 2 In his poetry, one has to ‘stand and stare’
with eyes wide and beaming with joy at the “sun’s eyelashes’ dance”, “the cold
leaf picking wind”, “the great, proud fields of gold”, “the dewdrops that
thrill the blades of grass”, “the drops of rain that shine like glowworms” and
the cloud that,
“……still grows and swells,
To reach the sun at last–
With a fine nipple she will have
On the top of her white breast”.
(Bird and Cloud)
The stars that bubble in clear skies enthrall him,
the beauty of the moon makes him feel like the child, the pattering of the rain
on the leaves fascinates him, and, when the innumerable choir of the day
welcome the dawn, his heart leaps up in joy. A rainbow and a cuckoo’s song
coming together move him to the very core of his heart and he exclaims–
“A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord
How rich and great the times are now.”
(A Great Time)
When he first sees the little wren, he says–
“I heard that little bird, at first
Me thought her frame would surely burst
With earnest song.”
(Jenny Wren)
A true love of all living things, coupled with a
sense of adoration of Nature, is the dominant note of almost all his nature
vignettes–
“Say what you like,
All things love me!
Horse, Cow and Mouse,
Bird, Moth and Bee.”
(Nature’s Friend)
One function of poetry, E. A. G. Lamborn tells us,
is to enable us to say, “I have seen the glory of the world”. 3 such
a revelation one gets if one reads the nature poems of Davies. “Somehow, this
world is beautiful at times”, seems to be the message of Davies and he bids us
be always on the alert lest we miss the “many splendoured” things.
The words with which Davies expresses himself are
simple, homely and direct. Utter simplicity, limpid clearness, familiar
imagery, and direct and spontaneous inspiration characterise his shorter
pieces, Some have taken exception to his vocabulary and have pointed out that
he is often common-place. But discerning critics recognised, as H. V. Routh
tells us, that this “half-educated wanderer had somewhere and somehow acquired
a sensitive awareness of outward things, including his fellow paupers, together
with insight into his own moods.”4 Davies is commonplace only in the
sense that he writes of commonplace things,–of owls, of wrens, hawks, the
clouds, the golden stooks, and of green and red apples, but he has the power to
make them come alive, and invests them with personality and makes us conscious
of new and intimate relations, of the thrill of new-born enthusiasm. Deep
emotion is not a feature of his poetry, nor does he concern himself with
abstruse philosophical ideas or any profound sentiment. In his unbrocaded
poetry, he sings as a “brook sings in the wood”–weaving into delicate patterns the
most insignificant things, and casting a halo of romance round the “wildness
and the wet”. He cannot be commonplace, for he has probed deep into the
commonplace things and has touched them to fine issues. Davies’s poetry is not
the outcome of emotion recollected in tranquillity. It is direct and
spontaneous. No sooner does he perceive a new facet of beauty than he breaks
forth into poetry. The cool sweetness of his lyrics is the result of his happy
and contented mental make-up. The quietness and calm of his daily life is
beautifully caught and reproduced in his poetry.
Literally a “far-wanderer,” Davies has a passion
for travelling and has a deep attachment for the sea. Of course, “the roar of
the sea” is no new note in English literature. The white surf thunders grimly
through Beowulf, and the call of the sea has elicited rapturous
responses from English poets of all times. Some of Masefield’s poems
communicate to us in a thrilling way–
“The beauty and the mystery of the ships
And the magic of the sea!”
But with Masefield, the attraction for the sea is a
‘fever’ and he must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the
sky. But Davies’s passion for the sea is in keeping with the quiet bent of his
mind. He distrusts violent passions and rarely bursts into raptures. He is at a
loss to understand why he yearns for the sea and longs to sail once more upon
its ‘fickle flood’. The sea has become part and parcel of his personality, and,
as with Binyon’s sailor John Winter, the ‘salt blows on his lips’. He is alive
to the caprices of the ocean when storms lash the vessels side with fury and
‘its many tailed whip’ tosses the tiny ship out in the vast ocean. One is
instinctively reminded of the description of the sea by Byron towards the close
of his Childe Harold. But while Byron revels in the ‘mightiness’ of the
sea, Davies feels sorry for the drowned sea-boy, looking so pathetic–
“But I have seen the sea-boy, young and drowned
Lying on thy shore and by thy cruel hand;
A seaweed beard was on his tender chin,
His heaven-blue eyes were filled with common sand.”
(Dreams of the Sea)
But in spite of all this, he cannot estrange himself from the sea, for–
“Thou knowest the way to tame the wildest life,
Thou knowest the way to bend the great and proud.”
(Dreams of the Sea)
In his love poetry, Davies almost approaches the
Elizabethan lyrists in his simplicity, naivete, and unconventionality. He has
quaffed no deep and exhausting draughts from the springs of passion and
emotion. His love poems are generally sober and breathe a spirit of
tranquillity. We miss in him the dulcet note of Bridges in his love poetry, or
the sensuousness of Rosette; nor do we find in his love poetry that sentiment
of Hardy, for whom the raptures of love are of less importance than that love
for one woman remains quiveringly alive from eighteen to eighty and beyond.
Davies’s lady-love is a simple country lass who “walks as lightly as the fly”.
Her beauty and graces enamour the poet, but he prizes no less her
unsophisticated mind and her winning rural manners. To see her face is health
and life to him. With her beside him, the poet does not care for any earthly
pleasure, for–
“When she is near, my arms can hold
All that’s worth having in this world!”
He is not beside himself with joy when he meets
her, nor is he dejected when she is away from him, for, in her absence, he
fondly dwells upon her charms and derives consolation from the thought that,
tucked away in a cosy nook, she–“a creature of light and radiance”–perhaps
dreams of life with him and has become one with the sun and the air–
“Where she is now, I cannot say;
The world has many a place of light
Perhaps the sun’s eyelashes dance
On hers, to give them both delight!”
(Where she is now)
Davies is a pure poet, but pure poets are now not
in fashion. A school has arisen which says that the sun, the moon, love, birds,
green fields and flowers have been overdone and that poetry must find out
“fresh woods and pastures new”–that poetry ought to be written about other
things. These critics will do well to remember Sir Philip Sidney’s sound
advice–“Look in thy heart and write”, and the fact that the human heart does
not change.
1 A. C. Ward –Twentieth
Century Literature –(Methuen P. 50).
2 An Anthology of
Modern Verse, with an Introduction by Robert Lynd –(Methuen) p. XXIII.