Davies’s images return with such frequency – the screaming bird occurs
a third time in ‘A Bird’s Anger’ – that the innocuous title of hisCollected
Poemsunintentionally suggests poems that have been collected and re-
assembled from a rather meagrely stocked poetic store-cupboard. A
skylark is a singing star in ‘April’s Charms’, ‘Day’s Black Star’, ‘The
Evening Star’ and ‘The Two Stars’. Clouds resemble sheep in ‘Clouds’
and ‘The Likeness’. There are numerous poems about birdsong in the
rain. It is not that these are bad images, but recycling them makes the
poems seem cooked up according to formula rather than experience,
where fields are always green, money is almost always ‘gold’ and girls
usually ‘maids’.
If Davies is difficult to appreciate at first, perhaps this simply reveals
how deeply embedded Romantic categories of heartfelt diction and
authorial originality are, yet interwoven with convention are moments
of freshness and surprise. ‘Early Morn’, above, continues:
It seemed as though I had surprised
And trespassed in a golden world
That should have passed while men slept!
‘Trespassed’ here beguilingly suggests Davies’s mystical awe (‘forgive us
our trespasses’) and more earth-bound tramping fears (‘trespassers will be
prosecuted’). But such precision is reserved for Davies’s feelings, not for
the landscape. This poem, like all of Davies’s nature-poems, is less about
nature than William H. Davies, natural, simple poet. As J. C. Squire
observed, ‘his moon is bright, his sheep are white, his lambs are woolly,
his fields green, his horses dumb, and with ‘‘pretty’’, ‘‘fair’’, ‘‘sweet’’,
‘‘sad’’, ‘‘hard’’ and ‘‘soft’’ one is almost half-way through his vocabu-
lary’.^15 But in a sense it does not matter, for Davies’s conventions testify to
his opennaı ̈vete ́as well; what counts in a Davies poem is not so much
accurate observation of nature as the construction of Davies’s ‘simple’
observation itself, and the frequent praise his Edwardian reviewers lav-
ished on him for being simple is all directed at his person, not on the
intrinsic merits of his poems. ‘Davies tells the truth because it does not
occur to him to say anything else’, typically, for, opined Squire, ‘his real
business is to look at common things with the child’s freshness and to
express his delight with simple spontanaity’.^16 What they enjoy is Davies
being a poet, not the poems in their own right. After Shaw’s preface to the
Autobiography of a Super-Trampmade mention of Davies’s ‘delicate and
individual’ handwriting, his publishers reproduced it in hisCollected
Poems( 1916 ) for the reader to appreciate the poet’s good character.^17 This
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 133