W. H. Davies: The Tramp Poet

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23203, 14 December 1940, Page 14

W. H. Davies: The Tramp Poet

“The Times” in its obituary article on W. H. Davies, the poet, who died recently at the age of 69, praised his “singularly naive and fundamentally innocent character, devoid alike of worldly ambition and pose.” Referring to his poetry, the article contained this passage; “In an experimental age when poets and prose-writers alike have exhausted themselves in search after new rhythms, word-coinages, and constructive devices, W. H. Davies retained a Wordsworthian simplicity. His favoured subjects were animals, flowers, country sounds and scenes, and of such things he wrote musically and charmingly, without investing them with a cosmic significance as greater poets like Wordsworth and Hardy have done.”

Some correction of this point of view was offered in a later issue by Mr Robert Nichols, whose tribute, that of a fellow-poet as well as friend, follows here. “In W. H. Davies these islands lose the physical presence of as rare and true a poet as they have been blessed with for many a long day. Journalistic custom speaks of him and his poems as simple. They weren’t. A native subtlety in both and the use'of traditional forms in the poems concealed the constant rebuke he administered to formal morality and our industrialised civilisation.

“ The poem about the bird-of-para-dise perched on the harlot’s bedpost is an instance of the first, and the poem about the lighted train carry-

ing workers to their toil while still fast asleep of the second. His vision of nature is often far from joyful and seldom as simple as at first sight it appears. Y r hether Davies had gipsy blood or no, his mind is a gipsy mind, and that mind is hieroglyphic, wanton, secret, paradoxical, and enigmatically crue 1 as well as childlike and tender; in fact very much like the mind of Nature itself. His poetic personality was remarkably idiosyncratic and his work has more variety than is com-

monly supposed. He was, as lyric poets go, extremely productive. Though none of his lyrics has the perfection and scope of Tennyson, he composed a greater number of lyrics of quality—as wil 1 become apparent when time .has sifted the period 1840-1940. “His appearance was striking. His head was an odd shape—much flattened at the sides —and he had a habit of tilting head and shoulders to one side like a wary thrush. His hair was black and thick, his countenance swarthy, the features pronounced (especially the nose), and his eyes of an astonishing blackness, sharpness, and brilliancy. He had a great capacity for private enjoyment, but only intimates were permitted to share it. For he was as particular in his affections as he was tenacious of them. His friends will cherish the memory of his appearance and individuality long after presences more- in the public eye have evaporated into that indistinctness against which Davies’s poSms and personality render him proof.”