The prevalent realistic disease in poetry is well represented by A Woman and her Son:
He set his teeth, and saw his mother die,
Outside a city reveller’s tipsy tread
Severed the silence with a jagged rent.
Above all, Davidson handles with marked facility the modern ballad medium of narrative verse. The Ballad of a Nun, The Ballad of an Artist’s Wife, and others, relate their story in easy, jogging quatrains. As a sample one can quote from A New Ballad of Tannhäuser:
As he lay worshipping his bride,
While rose leaves in her bosom fell,
On dreams came sailing on a tide
Of sleep, he heard a matin bell.
‘Hark! let us leave the magic hill,’
He said, ‘and live on earth with men.’
‘No, here,’ she said, ‘we stay until
The Golden Age shall come again.’
But if Davidson could tell a tale in verse it cannot be said he understood the novel form. Although here it is rather noticeable that he has a strange, unique feature among his contemporaries. For he at least has a sense of humour. Max Beerbohm, it is true, had the gift of irony; but Davidson, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim Scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed Mortimer in Perfervid. In Dowson, Johnson, Symons, and the others, one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. Lastly, but by no means least, Davidson occasionally attains the lyric rapture of unadulterated poetry in his shorter pieces, while his vignettes of nature linger in the memory on account of their truth and beauty. Both these qualities—the lyric rapture and the keen eye for country sights and sounds—are to be found, for instance, in A Runnable Stag:
When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,
And apples began to be golden-skinned,
We harboured a stag in the Priory coomb,
And we feathered his trail up wind, up wind!
Among many other ambitions, Davidson wanted to fire the scientific world with imaginative poetry. As he phrased it: ‘Science is still a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.’ There are indeed evidences of an almost Shelleyan pantheism in his credo. Unhappy was his life, but, probably, he did not labour in vain, for a handsel of his song will endure. Writing, indeed, was the consolation of his life:
I cannot write, I cannot think;
’Tis half delight and half distress;
My memory stumbles on the brink
Of some unfathomed happiness—
Of some old happiness divine,
What haunting scent, what haunting note,
What word, or what melodious line,
Sends my heart throbbing to my throat?