Such gentility does not prepare the reader for the modern directness of
the blousy visitor herself, ‘big with laughter at the breasts, / Like netted fish
they leap’. His sheep do not bleat, they ‘cough’, and a mouse heard alone at
night ‘inside the papered walls / Comes like a tiger crunching through the
stones’ (‘The Hermit’). Or take these lines in ‘Traffic’ describing snow:
Yet back to nature I must go –
To see the thin, mosquito flakes
Grow into moths of plumper snow.
‘Back to nature I must go’ is a pompous inversion of a cliche ́, but then
‘mosquito flakes’ catches not only the thinness but also the weightlessness of
early snow. Heavier snow is ‘plump’, a word that nicely mixes onomato-
poeia with suggestions of snow’s pillowing and swelling of hard outlines.
And if assessing the poet’s integrity through the quality of poetry like this
seems an overly evaluative approach, it is at least implicitly Davies’s own, for
his description of the beggar as a great artist, above, implies that an artist’s
worth is based on winning an audience for the artist’s persona. Yet his poems
provoke contrary responses, because it is not always clear what sort of person
has written them. It is like the dilemma of dealing with a persuasive beggar,
knowing whether to believe the destitution or the skill in telling the story of
such destitution. What sort of poet can write the sharp, direct lines that
Philip Larkin respected, and also such reams of formulated, often saccharine
verse? Larkin remarked that Davies’s verse trembled on the edge of ‘stodgy
unreality’, but ‘had the power to rise intermittently above this level by
piercingly happy moments of description and observation that carry the
poems that contain them permanently into our memory’.^55 Still, one might
wonder, why must it consistently wander along the edge in the first place?
One solution to this problem of incompatible material has been offered
by Michael Cullup, who sees Davies as a poet of realism and irony
submerged by the false nature-poems encouraged by Thomas and
others.^56 He cites the black humour of ‘The Inquest’, where Davies updates
the prosiness of ‘The Thorn’ to a contemporary child-abuse inquiry:
When I went out to see the corpse
The four months’ babe that died so young,
I judged it was seven pounds in weight,
And little more than four foot long. [.. .]
And I could see that child’s one eye
Which seemed to laugh and say with glee:
‘What caused my death you’ll never know –
Perhaps my mother murdered me.’The simplicity of W. H. Davies 143