The Welshman’s heaven is singing airs –
No matter who feels sick and swears.
For if Davies can write with such irony, then in the next poem he is as
likely to be embarrassingly unaware of what he has just written. ‘She rises
like the lark, that hour / He goes half-way to meet a shower’ (‘Charms’)
implies the beloved is levitating from her bed. Struggling for eight
syllables returns the ‘The Happy Child’ – who has hitherto spent his
day with the flowers, birds, and butterflies – abruptly back to Stepney:
My world this day has lovely been
But not like what the child has seen.
For all the evaluative approach his artist-beggar association invited,
Davies’s unembarrassed mix of conflicting messages about his simplicity
had an unexpected effect on his modernist admirers. It made him critic-
ally unassailable, as Pound felt compelled to confess in his review: ‘I do
not know that I can submit Mr Davies’s work to my usual acid test’.^58 His
co-Imagist F. S. Flint acknowledged a similar bewilderment, for ‘when
one approaches an aboriginal poet like Mr W. H. Davies, all one’s
theories about form fall to the ground’.^59 Pound and Flint were searching
for the superfluous, for rhetoric, for formality, and although Pound notes
how Davies ‘puts his words hind-side to... says did go and did sing and
so forth’, this ‘curious traditional dialect’ will not allow him to find it.
Pound has to admit his criterion for good poetry fails, because identifying
the superfluous means identifying the essential, but Davies’s lack of
proportion means they could never find that essential. Georgian and
Imagist lapses into rhetoric, warned Eliot, occurred when they wrote
about emotions which they did not really feel: Davies’s poetry can never
be caught acting, because its blithe mixture of sentiment and insight never
allows its reader a perspective of the man which would determine whether
those emotions might be spurious or not, as theAutobiographynever lets
you know which events will be significant or not.^60 To take an analogy
from painting, his verse resembles the unified-field perspective of naı ̈ve
art, where the lack of foreground – background distinction makes every-
thing belong together under one horizon. On the one hand, such pictures
make present for the artist his or her world and thus revolve entirely
around that artist, and yet because they have none of the independent
neutrality of the perspectival grid, the viewer has no idea of the artist’s
own position. As such, naı ̈ve art is an important part of the history of
twentieth-century experiments in artistic form, as Alfred Wallis belongs
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 145