October 3, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 6ij J. C Squire 
Mr. W. H. Davies 
IT is a ccftnmonplace now that we are in the midst of a 
poetic revival. It is also true. The revival began 
years before the war, but the war has had some effect 
upon it. The war has made firm the "set" of the 
young contemporary mind in a direction which it was 
already taking before the war. By bringing men harshly 
against the realities of death and loss, public and private, 
it has revealed themselves to themselves, shown them what, 
at bottom, they have always most cared about and what 
they have most lived by. The younger generation cares 
less for argument and more for the expression of its elementary' 
joys than the generations immediately above it. Instead of 
sitting gloomily on a fence in the middle of a wide prairie 
of doubts it has achieved some sort of faith ; and in a world 
of blood and havoc it has taken a firm hold of the roots of 
happiness. Intellect and emotion in harmony have produced 
a poetic outlook and "atmosphere," with the result that 
many uncertain singers have greatly developed and many 
minor ones are writing fresh, honest, moving verse, who in 
a more materialistic sceptical and dialectic age would have 
written nothing at all. We have not — or we do not yet 
know that we have— the large outstanding figures ; but lor' 
mass of good work fit for the anthologies and produced by 
many hands I do not see any age since the Elizabethan which 
can compare with ours. 
* ' * * * * * 
The new poetry — one cannot escape the word "new," but 
it wants qualification — has also its distinctive marks, as 
the poetry of any age nlust have. The historians will trace 
technical developments, and all sorts of influences exercised 
by elements in contemporary speculation and by scientific 
and evpn geographical discovery. There are fresh mines 
of material and of imagery in the human mind and in the 
physical world. The poetic emotion, the sources of good 
poetry, remain constant : poems in A.D. loooo, as in a.d. i, 
will be born of a perception of strange yet familiar beauty 
which moves the heart to mingled exaltation and pain ; and 
the last of the spectacles which shall touch those hidden 
strings \vill never be unveiled. Our age will, have its colour 
and its content to be labelled when we are dead ; and no 
living writer will have been found to have escaped the 
common tendencies of his age. But if there be such a writer, 
such a good and permanent writer, he will, I should say, 
prove to be Mr. W. H. Davies; still, unfortunately, known 
to many people only as the author of the Autobiography of a 
Super-Tramp. 
****** 
Mr. Davies takes remarkably little notice of contemporary 
movements, and I should imagine that he does not extensively 
read contemporary literature. Whatever it was that made 
him begin to sing it was not a contemporary atmosphere. 
He began writing poetry when it was still in England at a 
low ebb ; the marks of his age, possibly apparent to pos- 
terity, are not visible in him to that age ; and whatever 
changes have come over our literature in the last fifteen years 
have left him completely untouched. Practice has improved 
his technique since he first published a book ; but his outlook, 
his subject-matter, his interests, and his metres, have re- 
mained essentially what they were. He wrote because a 
few simple things moved him to write, and had moved him 
before he had ever lived amongst books or the bookish. He 
still writes for the same reason ; and he still writes about 
the same things. No good poet was ever less intellectual. 
He seldom speculates, and if he sometimes generalises he 
proves merely that generalisation is not his line. He has 
travelled widely, seen many places and many men ; but his 
travels give nothing to his verse but an occasional strange or 
bright picture used metaphorically or as a foil to his English 
sketches. Nor is he a subtle artist ; he never makes a cunning 
appeal to eye or ear by means of concealed or demonstrative 
artifice. But he is a man of genius, and his genius is still 
alive ; and after many years of songs about girls and 
children, robins and thrushes, hills and the moon, cows, 
sheep, Clouds, and beer, he still writes with a freshness of 
impulse that makes each song a new song and pre- 
vents him from lapsing into that habit of self-imitation 
which is especially dangerous for writers of his kind. 
He could so easily have turned into a factory of insincere 
prettinesses. 
His Forty New Poems (Fifield, 4s. net) is, I think, his 
eighth volume of verse ; excluding Collected Poems (Fifield, 
6s. net), which is the book to' which those who do not know 
his work should first be recommended. The new volume is 
as good as any ; it may lack the few outstanding things, but 
it includes many charming ones. The first poem in the book 
is very typical : 
Sing for the sun your lyric, lark, 
Of twice ten thousand notes ; 
Sing for the moon, yob nightingales. 
Whose light shall kiss your throats ; 
Sing, sparrows, for the soft, warm rain. 
To wet your feathers through ; 
.And, when a rainbow's in the sky. 
Sing you, cuckoo — "Cuckoo !" 
Sing for your five blue eggs, fond thrush, 
By many a leaf concealed ; 
You starlings, wrens, and blackbirds sing 
In every wood and field : 
\Ahile I, who fail to give my love 
Long raptures twice as line. 
Will for her beauty breathe this one — 
A sigh, that's more divine. 
This shows his chief qualities, with the exception of one : 
the minuteness of observation with which he so frequently 
and unexpectedly delights us — observation not for cold 
observation's sake, but made in a moment of emotional 
apprehension. You get that elsewhere in his song about the 
joy he gets from looking at birds' foot-prints in the snow ; 
and in Till I Went Out : 
Till I went out of doors to prove 
What through my window I saw move ; 
To see if grass were brighter yet. 
And if the stones were dark and wet. 
Till I went out to see a sign — 
That slanted rain, so light and fine. 
Had almost settled in my mind 
That I at last could see the wind. 
The effect is never produced by very exact language ; no 
good poet who ever lived had so small a vocabulary or so 
narrow a range of adjectives. But his joy is so real, his 
statements so direct, that we do not mind that ; an indefin- 
able tone of sincerity, a simple but real music, make his 
verse good even when, superficially, it is a mere catalogue of 
white clouds, green grass, and woolly sheep, each endowed 
with the one obvious adjective that most people are afraid 
to use. Take Cowslips and Larks : 
I hear it said yon land is poor. 
In spite of those rich cowslips there — 
And all the singing larks it shoots 
To heaven from the cowslips' roots. 
But I, with eyes that beauty find. 
And music ever in my mind, 
Feed my thoughts well upon that grass 
Which star\es the horse, the ox, and ass. 
So here I stand, two miles to come 
To Shapwick and my ten-days home, 
Taking my summer's joy, although 
The distant clouds are dark and low. 
And comes a storm that, fierce and strong, 
Has brought the Mendip Hills along : 
Those hills that, when the light is there. 
Are many a sunny mile from here. 
There is not an unusual word here or an epitiiet that anyone 
would ever dream of quoting, detached from its context : 
but it succeeds, and one does not forget it. One of the 
most striking poems in the book is ^that in memory of his 
friend' Edward Thomas, who until he left the England he 
loved for the front had " never left it once before.'.' The 
note of grief is an unqsual one for Mr. Davies, and the poem 
is all the more moving for that. His whimsical qualities, 
sometimes very attractive, are not much in evidence ; but 
there is a charming excursus beginning "The moon is full, 
and so am 1." That phrase, 1 may add, is in a manner 
symbolical : Mr. Davies would scarcelj' bother to distinguish 
between his enjoyment of the moon and his enjoyment of 
beer. The universe to him is a place full of simple 
and delightful things : one is as good as another, and he is 
content, us a rule, to lei mysteries alone. 
