This, and the sardonic final ‘Next!’ in ‘The Hospital Waiting-Room’
gives the voice of the modern anyone a characteristically knowing disillu-
sionment, partly covert aggression towards the bossiness of the system and
partly relief at knowing what’s what – a tone which became an important
weapon in the war poetry of Davies’s fellow Georgians Graves and
Sassoon. Like their parodies of patriotic songs, Davies can play delicately
with his own folk-song and cheerful poverty image:
When I had money, money, O!
My many friends proved all untrue;
But now I have no money, O!
My friends are real, though very few.
A poem about the intricacies of feminine coiffure, its ‘strange tools’
screwing, twisting, turning and shaping, ends with ‘Ah, now I see how
smooth her brow / And her simplicity of face’. But leafing through the
Collected Poems, these are exceptions to the rule of quaint jollity in nature:
if Davies could be such an ironic realist about bureaucracy, why did he
not turn the same eye on his nature-verse? In fact, it was Thomas himself
who noted this mixture of insight and ‘a charming artificiality probably
due to a combination of nature and memory of books’. His solution,
however, was not to discover a real insightful Davies submerged or re-
pressed by powerful forces, but subtly to suggest that the paradox is the
point itself:
This artificiality is part of Mr Davies’s simplicity. For it is of the essence of
simplicity that it is without fear. The improbable, the unusual, the hackneyed,
the grotesque, are not known to it by their names... the slips of grammar and
syntax in his work, the formality of words and phrases and apparently bookish
phrases adopted and made real. These are trifles. They are the very low price
which he has to pay for his freedom of the world visible and invisible.^57
Davies’s simplicity is not revealed by the absence of thought in twee
nature-verses. In fact, he teases his audience for getting their nature from
his books:
Cuckoo! Cuckoo! was that a bird,
Or but a mocking boy you heard?
You heard the Cuckoo first, ’twas he;
The second time – Ha, ha! –’twas Me.(‘A Merry Hour’)
For Thomas, it would lie in his ability to write a poem as skippily
vacuous as ‘Happy Wind’,andthe ironically disillusioned final couplet of
‘Heaven’:
144 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism