"A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.""As long as I love Beauty I am young.""But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near.""It was the rainbow gave thee birth, and left thee all her lovely hues.""Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.""What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?"
Davies spent a significant part of his life as a tramp or vagabond in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time. The principal themes in his work are the marvels of nature, observations about life's hardships, his own tramping adventures and the various characters he met. Davies is usually considered as one of the Georgian poets, although much of his work is atypical of the style and themes adopted by others of the genre.
The son of an iron-moulder, Davies was born at 6, Portland Street in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport, Monmouthshire and a busy port. His father died when he was just two years old. When his mother remarried she agreed that care of the three children should pass to their paternal grandparents who ran the nearby Church House Inn at 14, Portland Street. His grandfather Francis Boase Davies, originally from Cornwall, had been a sea captain.
Davies was related to the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving (referred to as cousin Brodribb by the family).
In his 1918 "Poet's Pilgrimage" Davies recounts the time when, at the age of 14, he had been left `with orders' to sit with his dying grandfather. He missed the final moments of his grandfather's passing as he had been too engrossed in reading "...a very interesting book of wild adventure". This revealing anecdote betrayed the passion Davies was to have all his life, despite his humble background, for the written word.
After finishing school in disgrace at the age of 15 (having been given twelve strokes of the birch for shoplifting with a gang of school-mates), his grandmother signed the papers for Davies to become an apprentice to a local picture-frame maker. Davies never enjoyed the craft, however, and never settled into any regular work. He was a difficult and somewhat delinquent young man, and made repeated requests to his grandmother to lend him the money to sail to America. When these were all refused, he eventually left Newport, took casual work and started to travel. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, published in 1908, covers his life in the USA between 1893 and 1899, and includes many adventures and characters from his travels as a drifter. During this period he crossed the Atlantic at least seven times working on cattle ships. He travelled widely, through many of the States, sometimes begging, sometimes taking seasonal work, but often ending up spending any savings on a drinking spree with a fellow traveller. At one stage, on his way to Memphis, Tennessee he lay alone in a swamp for three days and nights suffering from malaria.
The great turning point in Davies' life came when he read in England of the riches to be made in the Klondike and immediately set off to make his fortune in Canada. Attempting to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario, however, with fellow tramp Three-fingered Jack, he lost his footing and his right foot was crushed under the wheels of the train. The leg later had to be amputated below the knee and he wore a wooden leg thereafter. Davies' biographers have agreed that the significance of the accident should not be underestimated, even though Davies himself played down the story. Moult dramatically begins his biography with the incident and Stonesifer has suggested that this event more than any other led Davies to become a professional poet.. Davies himself wrote of the accident:
But Davies' view of his own disability was ambivalent. In his poem The Fog, published in the 1913 Foliage the blind man leads the poet through the fog, showing the reader that one who is handicapped in one domain may well have a considerable advantage in another.
He returned to Britain, living a rough life, particularly in London shelters and doss-houses, including the Salvation Army hostel in Southwark known as "The Ark" [1] which he grew to despise. So desperate was he to compose that, fearing the contempt of his fellow tramps, he would often feign slumber in the corner of his doss-house, mentally composing his poems and only later committing them to paper in private. So desperate was he to see his work in print that at one stage he borrowed the money to have his poems printed on loose sheets of paper which he then tried to sell door-to-door through the streets of residential London. When this enterprise failed miserably, he returned to his lodgings and, in a fit of rage, burned all of the printed sheets in the fire.
His first book of poetry "The Soul's Destroyer" was self-published in 1905, again by means of Davies' own savings. It proved to be the beginning of success and a growing reputation. In order to even get the slim volume published Davies had to forego his allowance and live the life of a tramp for six months (with the first draft of the book hidden in his pocket), just to secure a loan of funds from his inheritance. When eventually published the volume was largely ignored and he resorted to posting individual copies by hand to prospective wealthy customers chosen from the pages of "Who's Who", asking them to send the price of the book, a half crown, in return. He eventually managed to sell 60 of the 200 copies printed.
One of the copies was sent to Arthur Adcock, then a journalist with the Daily Mail. On reading the book, as he later wrote in his essay Gods Of Modern Grub Street, Adcock said that he
[...] recognised that there were crudities and even doggerel in it, there was also in it some
of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books.
He promptly sent the price of the book and asked Davies to meet him. Adcock is still generally regarded as "the man who discovered Davies" .
On 12 October 1905 Davies met Edward Thomas, then literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London, who was to do more to help him than anyone else. Thomas rented a tiny two-roomed cottage for Davies not far from his own home at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent. Davies moved to the cottage (n Eel Pie Lane (".. only two meadows off .." from Thomas' own house ) from Newport, via London, in the second week of February 1907. Thomas adopted the role of protective guardian for Davies, on one occasion even arranging for the manufacture, by a local wheelwright, of a makeshift replacement wooden leg.
In 1907 the manuscript of "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp" drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who agreed to write a preface (largely through the concerted efforts of his wife Charlotte). It was only because of Shaw that Davies' contract with the publishers was re-written to allow the author to retain the serial rights, all rights after three years, royalties of fifteen per cent of selling price and a non-returnable advance of twenty five pounds. Davies was also to be given a say on the style of all illustrations, advertisement layouts and cover designs. The original publisher, Duckworth and Sons, refused to accept these demands and so the book was placed instead with London publisher Fifield.
A number of anecdotes of Davies' time with the Thomas family in Kent are recounted in the brief account later published by Thomas' widow Helen. In 1911 Davies was awarded a Civil List Pension of £50, later increased to £100 and then again to £150.
After lodging at a number of temporary addresses in Sevenoaks, Davies moved back to London early in 1914, settling eventually at 14, Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district (previously the residence of Charles Dickens). Here in a tiny two-room apartment, initially infested with mice and rats, and next door to rooms occupied by a noisy Belgian prostitute, he lived from early 1916 until 1921.
It was during this time in London that Davies embarked on a series of public readings of his work, alongside such others as Hillaire Belloc and W. B. Yeats, impressing such fellow poets as Ezra Pound. He soon found that he was able to socialise with leading society figures of the day, including Lord Balfour and Lady Randolph Churchill.
While in London Davies also became friendly with a number of artists including Jacob Epstein, Harold and Laura Knight, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Harold Gilman, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Sir William Nicholson and Osbert and Edith Sitwell.
In his poetry Davies drew extensively for material on his experiences with the seamier side of life, but also on his love of nature. By the time of his prominent place in the Edward Marsh Georgian poetry series, he was an established figure. He is generally best known for the opening two lines of the poem Leisure, first published in "Songs Of Joy and Others" in 1911:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass,
No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at beauty's glance
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
In the last months of 1921 Davies moved to more comfortable quarters at 13, Avery Row, Brook Street, where he rented rooms from the Quaker poet Olaf Baker. He began to find prolonged work difficult, however, suffering from increased bouts of rheumatism and other ailments.
Harlow (1993) lists a total of 14 BBC broadcasts of Davies reading his own work made between 1924 and 1940 (now held in the BBC broadcast archive) although none included his most famous work "Leisure".
On 5 February 1923, Davies married 23 year-old Helen Payne, at the Registry Office in East Grinstead, Sussex and the couple set up home in the town at "Tor Leven", Cantelupe Road. According to one of the witnesses, Conrad Aiken, the ceremony proceeded with Davies "in a near panic".
His book Young Emma was a frank and often disturbing account of his life before and after picking Helen up at a bus-stop in the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. Still unmarried, Helen was pregnant at the time. Whilst living with Davies in London, before the couple were married, Helen suffered a dramatic and almost fatal miscarriage.
Although Davies eagerly sent the manuscript for Young Emma to Jonathan Cape in August 1924, he later changed his mind and asked for the manuscript to be returned and the copies destroyed. Only Davies' lack of direct instruction prompted Cape to secretly keep the copies in a locked safe. Later, following Davies' death, when asked by Cape for his advice, George Bernard Shaw advised against publication and the book was to be eventually published only after Helen's death in 1979.
The couple lived quietly and happily, moving from East Grinstead, first to Sevenoaks, then to "Malpas House", Oxted in Surrey and finally settling at a series of five different residences at Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. The first of these was the comfortable nineteenth century stone house "Shenstone" and the last the small roadside cottage "Glendower" in the hamlet of Watledge. The couple had no children. As of 2010, "Glendower" is in a state of disrepair having been neglected for many years.
"Later Days", the 1925 sequel to "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp", describes the beginnings of Davies' career as a writer and his acquaintance with Belloc, Shaw and de la Mare, amongst many others.
In 1926 Davies was honoured with the degree of Doctor Litteris, honoris causa from the University of Wales.
Davies returned to his native Newport in September 1938 for the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the Church House Inn with an address given by the Poet Laureate John Masefield. He was unwell, however, and this proved to be his last public appearance. His health deteriorated, not helped by the weight of his wooden leg, and he died in September 1940 at the age of 69. Never a church-goer in his adult life, Davies was cremated at Cheltenham and his remains interred there.
A controversial statue by Paul Bothwell-Kincaid, inspired by the poem "Leisure", was unveiled in Commercial Street, Newport in December 1990 to commemorate Davies' work, on the 50th anniversary of his death.
The bronze head of Davies by Epstein, from January 1917, regarded by many as the most accurate artistic impression of Davies and a copy of which Davies owned himself, may be found at Newport Museum and Art Gallery.
Stonesifer likens the quality of Davies' prose, with its often childlike realism, directness and simplicity, to that of Defoe and George Borrow, while Davies' style was described by Shaw as that of "a genuine innocent".
For his honorary degree in 1926, Davies was introduced to the assembly at the University of Wales by Professor W. D. Thomas, M.A. with a citation that may still serve as a valid summary of Davies' literary themes, style and tone:
"... a Welshman, a poet of distinction, and a man in whose work much of the peculiarly Welsh attitude to life is expressed with singular grace and sincerity. He combines a vivid sense of beauty with affection for the homely, keen zest for life and adventure with a rare appreciation of the common, universal pleasures, and finds in those simple things of daily life a precious quality, a dignity and a wonder that consecrate them. Natural, simple and unaffected, he is free from sham in feeling and artifice in expression. He has re-discovered for those who have forgotten them, the joys of simple nature. He has found romance in that which has become commonplace; and of the native impulses of an unspoilt heart, and the responses of a sensitive spirit, he has made a new world of experience and delight. He is a lover of life, accepting it and glorying in it. He affirms values that were falling into neglect, and in an age that is mercenary reminds us that we have the capacity for spiritual enjoyment."
Somewhat surprisingly, his great friend and mentor, Edward Thomas, likened Davies to Wordsworth, writing:
"He can write commonplace or inaccurate English, but it is also natural to him to write, such as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness and felicity which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds, and where else today shall we find simplicity like this?"
