Happy Dan Davies, how can I help writing about him? It is a pleasure to be on the slope of a hill and move the little pawns of fancy over the green chess-board below; it is a pleasure to write about Davies, to trite about Davies.

Because W. H. Davies is the easiest of poets to read and enjoy, so he is the most difficult to judge. He has published poetry steadily for ten years, and in 1916 gathered himself a harvest of his work, selected out of his eight volumes. Let that be the thymy bank for me. What is one to say about such poems, the darling summer of Davies's genius? There is no possible ambiguity about them; there is no breach for an angry criticism to enter. Here are at least a score of poems of fine, fresh lustre and final accomplishment. What poet, since the death of Francis Thompson, dare say as much for his own? The very boundaries of Davies's poetic landscape make him secure within them. You do not gird at Campion because he is not Donne. Davies's metres have the fewest alterations and experiments of almost any poet in the language. His genius does not scale heavenly precipices nor take ship to unknown ports

of spiritual adventure. But if his muse is not blinded by heaven, neither does it look backwards. Why should it? On earth there are many Paradises, and Davies has made one and dwelt in it.

Only paradox can call him a poet of the intellect, or of discontent, or of speculation, or of prophecy, or of abstraction, or of sombre and imperial vision. But the unity of his mood and the felicity of his phrase are incomparable, and of so absolute a bridal in its definite creation and fulfilment that you forget not only the skill that fashioned but that these things are left out. Impalpable things he does not charm into being, but the green world is all about him, transfigured into an art rapturous in joy, candid in feeling, and perfect in outline. Life is not so simple as Davies makes it, but he makes us wish that it were. The number of his poetic themes may perhaps be counted on the ten fingers, but they are universal themes, and Sir Patrick Spens could understand them, and so (if he would open his ears) could a clerk or a stockbroker. His poetic expression, pungently individual as it is, is rarely subjective, and his emotion no more than superficially personal. They are so gladly and spontaneously absorbed into his art, they are so free from the particularities of egoism, so clear and conscious in workmanship, and so intimately allied with his subject and with himself, so far as he has projected himself into his subject, that their beauty is really objective. Just as Rembrandt's carriage is not simply a horseless carriage, but the significance, the emotion, the metaphysic of carriages as conceived by a draughtsman on a plane conveying a particular appeal; so Davies's skylarks and bees and laughing women are the concrete

embodiment of the reality of skylarks, bees, and laughing women, as it has always been since the beginning of the world, as it will always be until the end-until, that is to say, we have killed off the skylarks. In an obvious sense, his poems are not great; in a deeper sense they are and will remain great, so long as human memory can last and so long as human beings become neither apes nor angels. Even putting his inspiration at its lowest and allowing his lyre but one string, his utterance comes so near to the sources of joy that surely while joy is a possession of humanity (and we have well-nigh lost it), so long will Davies belong to humanity.

But these are still commonplaces, just as the verdict of the age upon him is and must be a commonplace. We accept him as we accept no other of our poets, and as but very few of our poets will be accepted by posterity. There seems nothing for criticism to do but to refine, modify, regulate, or readjust that judgment—to make reservations or accretions of detail to it. Yet does not this detail possibly reveal a new Davies, an expanded Davies? Consider his use of irony, for instance, in the first stanza of “Ale " :

That from the poet of naïveté! It shows how he can come out of his shell and put up his horns. Indeed his economy of phrase is so exact and true that I should have

been surprised if he had never used irony-so wedded are the twain. An example of this crisp and sparing phrase -as though he were able to pay hard labour with small change-occurs in the enchanting lyric "Plants and Men." Plants have first buds, then flowers, and berries last: "Sweet buds, fair flowers,

The human and general application of transience is reserved to and condensed in those last two words, " and men." A model of swift transition. Surely economy could go no further. Something of the same masterly containment of words is achieved in the poem " A Maiden and her Hair," where only in the last two lines of the last stanza is the maiden suddenly made living and expressive. In the rest of the poem it is her hands and hair that live, not she:

"Now that her hair is bound secure

Coil top

of coil in smaller space,

Ah! now I see how smooth her brow,

And her simplicity of face"

Another characteristic which seals the masculinity rather than the sweetness of Davies's numbers is the way he will shoot out a poignant and fiery phrase from the evenly beating and contented heart of his verse. The Hermit":

"Or when the moth on his night-pillow beats

Such heavy blows, he fears they'll break his bones;

Or when a mouse inside the papered walls

Comes like a tiger crunching through the stones."

Or :

"When under ferns fresh pulled I buried her,
And called her forth like Lazarus from the grave."

Or :

“Still full of wild romance as in those days,

Or:

Ere England launched her forests on the sea."

"I hear thy gentle whisper and again

Or:

Hear ripples lap the quays of sheltered docks;
I hear thy thunder and it brings to mind
Dark Colorado scaling his huge rocks."

"For fear the beauty of her face Made Paradise in flames like Troy."

Or:

"Then in a flash! saw the Sea trying With savage joy, and efforts wild,

To smash his rocks with a dead child."

Not, mind, smash a dead child on his rocks, which is how an average rhymer would put it. What a magnificent terror that slight transposition effects! Only one more of these too-tempting extracts :

"He told us how he sailed in one old ship

Near that volcano, Martinique, whose power
Shook like dry leaves the whole Caribbean seas;
And made the sun set in a sea of fire