Each man sat in a huddled heap,
Carried to work while fast asleep.
Ten cars rushed down the waterside
Like lighted coffins in the dark;
With twenty dead men in each car,
That must be brought alive by work.
Much of this poem seems composed in lumps; ‘at a bound’, ‘pale and
weary’, ‘huddled in a heap’ and ‘fast asleep’ are terrible cliche ́s, but then
the hints of the workers’ undead automatism (‘I had not thought death
had undone so many’) in describing their trams as ‘lighted coffins’ is
startling, and suggests that the worn-out phrases might be germane to the
poem’s point. Similarly, ‘Charms’ opens with a perfect couplet:
She walks as lightly as the fly
Skates on the water in July.
The second line’s trochee mimes the fly’s ability to put its slight weight
upon an uncertain or unexpected footing, but such delicacy entirely
disappears in the next couplet:
When I in my Love’s shadow sit,
I do not miss the sun one bit.
Again, is the reader supposed to be charmed by the quality of the verse,
or by thenaı ̈vete ́of the telling? So often, after yet another rhyme of
‘flower’ and ‘hour’, ‘boy’ and ‘joy’, Davies will slip in an unexpectedly
vivid physical image that lifts the poem from itsersatzsimplicity. ‘The
Boy’ starts unpromisingly with ‘Go, little boy / Fill thee with joy’, but the
third stanza continues:
Fear not, like man,
The kick of wrath,
That you do lie
In some one’s path.
There is a certain sympathetic humour in the way the King James-era
‘Fear not’, ‘wrath’ and ‘do lie’ are gently ironised by the modern anonymity
of ‘some one’, as inexplicably angry as Jehovah; for a former beggar that ‘kick’
may not be metaphorical. The antique coyness of the opening couplet of
‘The Visitor’ could almost have ‘April’ printed in italics, half-month and
half-goddess:
She brings that breath, and music too,
That comes when April’s days begin.142 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism