Mare’s delicate rhythmic probings of the uncanny in his hypersensitively
textured verse. But for the modern reader coming to Davies’s work for
the first time, magic and rapture, at least, seem a long way from Davies’s
straightforward nature-poems in jog-trot metre, which mostly tell the reader
what he likes: green fields, white sheep and happy cows. Given Thomas’s own
delicate, precise evocation of the natural world, his admiration becomes more
mysterious when one considers a typical Davies poem – and the point is
precisely that one can identify a ‘typical’ Davies poem, since what is most likely
to strike a reader about his supposedly ‘fresh, unbiased observation’ is its
conventionality and formula.^13 An often-reprinted nature-poem, ‘Early
Morn’, for example:
Then I arose to take the air –
The lovely air that made birds scream;
Just as green hill launched the ship
Of gold, to take its first clear dip.
And it began its journey then,
As I came forth to take the air;
The timid Stars had vanished quite,
The Moon was dying with a stare;
Horses, and kine, and sheep were seen
As still as pictures, in fields green.^14
The green fields, green hill and gold sun suggest this picture is being
painted by numbers, and ‘dip’ is particularly unfortunate when the sun is
actually rising. A sense of distance from any particular landscape is
reinforced by the passive tense of ‘were seen’, as if it were not Davies
looking, and the conventions become even clearer when elements of the
poem are reassembled in ‘The East in Gold’:
Somehow this world is wonderful at times,
As it has been from early morn in May;
Since first I heard the cock-a-doodle-do,
Timekeeper on green farms – at break of day.
The farm may have been red brick, brown timber or grey stone with
fields in shades of brown and yellow, but in Davies’s poem it is green
because that is the accepted code for nature, the ‘green world’:
I could not sleep again, for such wild cries,
And went out early into their green world;
And then I saw what set their little tongues
To scream for joy – they saw the East in gold.132 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism