WH Davies 1871-1940

Most famous poem Leisure:

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 daylight,
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.

Place of Birth: Newport

Biography:
The life of Newport’s “tramp poet” is one of the most remarkable in literary history.
William Henry Davies was born in lowly circumstances in Portland Street in the Pill district of Newport, the son of an iron-moulder who died when he was two years old.

His mother remarried and left her three children to be adopted by their grandparents, who ran the nearby Church House Inn. Badly behaved as a teenager, Davies joined a shoplifting gang and was given the birch for stealing two bottles of perfume.

On leaving school he began work as an ironmonger before signing up as apprentice to a picture frame maker. But Davies was dissatisfied with life in Newport, leaving first for London, then Bristol, and eventually the USA in 1893.

He spent the next six years intermittently working and begging his way across North America, occasionally working his passage back to the UK as a sailor on cattle ships. Being jailed for vagrancy was an occupational hazard which at least offered a few days’ shelter.

Davies documented this period of his life in his acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Super-Tramp although the book may be short on facts and long on embellishment. The turning point in his life was the loss of a leg after he was dragged under the wheels of an express train he’d tried to jump onto at Renfrew, Ontario.

Unfit for manual labour or life on the road, Davies turned to writing and returned to London where working-class poetry was all the rage and his memorable, accessible verse found favour. But the bohemian boy from Pill felt out of place in Edwardian London’s literary circles.

At the age of fifty he married Helen Payne, a prostitute thirty years his junior, leaving the city to move first to Sussex and later Gloucestershire. Davies continued writing and an account of his marriage was eventually published in 1980 as Young Emma.

He 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. Davies was unwell, 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.

A statue inspired by his poem Leisure can be seen in Commercial Street in Newport.

Works