w. H. DAVIES.

Evening Star, Issue 23693, 28 September 1940, Page 10

w. H. DAVIES.

Who are the memorable? It is a reasonable conjecture that, when hundreds of names, loud to-day, have been forgotten, that of W. H. Davies, who was a tramp and a sleeper in “ dosshouses ” and hawked his first poems at threepence a sheet and whose death is reported to-day, will survive. There is a story of a woman who gave him a penny, but would not take the verses. Living on ten shillings a week Davies was rich. He had the seeing eye; in the rush and hustle of life he could stand entranced; he had the gift of song. Far more than'Lord Tennyson, w T ho did right, for his part, in being the conscious artist, he “ piped but as the linnets sing,” and no one would have his songs otherwise. He poked fun at his gift as a trick. It was merely, he said, to gape with astonishment at something quite commonplace and to pretend that you had never seen it before, but that did not explain it. He lost a foot early in life jumping aboard a moving train at night in America to steal a ride, but he loved tramping, and wrote good prose as well as verse about it, to the end, even when a Civil List pension allowed him better homes than dosshouses. He was a natural Elizabethan in his verses. Mr Basil de Selincourt has called him “ a man at anchor ” in our restless time, and written “ how strange that anyone could think our English tradition in danger, with this fountain playing in our midst, so free, so unconcerned, so resolute, reminding us continually what inspiration is and where it is to be found.” His best things should have a chance of being still loved in two or three hundred years.