The gaiety of that, considered simply in its lightness of heart, its verbal and metrical felicity, is a delightful thing. And it recurs so frequently as to make Mr Davies quite the jolliest of modern poets. So if we are content to stop there, if we are not teased by an instinct to relate things, and see all round them, we may make holiday pleasantly enough with this part of the poet's work. The method is not really satisfying, however, and the inclusion of the more personal pieces adds a deeper value to the study. Not merely because the facts of a poet's life are interesting in themselves, but because here especially they are illuminating, explanatory, suggestive: connecting and unifying the philosophical interest of the work, and supplying a background, curiously impressive, for its art.
For that reason one would refuse to pass over in silence Mr Davies' first book of poems, The Soul's Destroyer, published in 1907. Not that it is perfect poetry: indeed, I doubt whether one really satisfying piece could be chosen from the whole fourteen. But it has deep human interest. The book is slim, sombre, almost insignificant in its paper wrappers. But its looks belie it. It is, in fact, nothing less than a flame of courage, a shining triumph of the spirit of humanity. Mr Shaw has made play with the facts of this poet's life, partly because 'it is his nature so to do,' and partly, one suspects, to hide a deeper feeling. But play as you will with the willing vagabondage, the happy irresponsibility, the weakness and excess and error of a wild youth, you will only film the surface of the tragedy. Underneath will remain those sullen questions—what is life about, what are our systems and our laws about, that a human creature and one with the miraculous spark of genius in him, is chased hungry and homeless up and down his own country, tossed from continent to continent and thrown up at last, broken and all but helpless, to be persecuted by some contemptible agent of charity and to wander from one crowded lodging-house to another, seeking vainly for a quiet corner in which to make his songs. The verses in The Soul's Destroyer were written under those conditions; and by virtue of that it would seem that the drab little volume attains to spiritual magnificence.
The themes in this book and those of New Poems, published in the same year, are of that personal kind of which we have already spoken. But you will be quite wrong if you suppose that they are therefore gloomy. On the contrary, though there is an occasional didactic piece, like that which gives its title to the first volume, there is more often a vein of humour. Thus we have the astonishing catalogue of lodging-house humanity in "Saints and Lodgers" with the satirical flavour of its invocation:
Ye saints, that sing in rooms above,
Do ye want souls to consecrate?
And there is "The Jolly Tramp," a scrap of autobiography, perhaps the least bit coloured:
I am a jolly tramp: I whine to you,
Then whistles till I meet another fool.
I call the labourer sir, the boy young man,
The maid young lady, and the mother I
Will flatter through the youngest child that walks.
In "Wondering Brown" there is surely something unique in poetry: not alone in theme, and the extraordinary set of circumstances which enabled such a bit of life to be observed, by a poet, from the inside; but in the rare quality of it, its sympathetic satire, the genial incisiveness of its criticism of life:
There came a man to sell his shirt,
A drunken man, in life low down;
When Riley, who was sitting near,
Made use of these strange words to Brown.
"Yon fallen man, that's just gone past,
I knew in better days than these;
Three shillings he could make a day,
As an adept at picking peas."