The True Traveller

A Reader

W. H. Davies, Rory Waterman

• Publisher: Fyfield Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784100872
• eBook ISBN: 9781784100889
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

W. H. Davies (1871-1940) was popularly though reductively known as the 'tramp-poet' due to his remarkable journey from vagrancy, in Britain and the United States, to considerable literary success. 'Discovered' in part by Edward Thomas, who admired his poetry, Davies became a prolific memoirist and occasional writer of fiction, criticism and drama. He is now known almost exclusively for a handful of poems and for his memoir The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp; his other writing has long been out of print. This book collects generous selections from Davies's prose memoir, poetry, and critical prose, alongside comprehensive notes by the editor. It brings back into print the work of a remarkable, controversial and unduly neglected author.

Selected Poems

Davies saw himself primarily as a poet, and a prolific one. As he put it in Later Days, ‘If I had said as many prayers as I have written poems, I would have probably been the Pope of Rome today, or at least a Bishop or Cardinal’.²⁰¹ However, though he published twenty-five books of verse in the second half of his life, between 1905 and 1939, some of these volumes are very short, and the posthumous Complete Poems of W. H. Davies includes a substantial but not overwhelming haul of 749 poems, most of which are short lyrics.²⁰² The title of his fourth collection, Farewell to Poesy (1910), implies that Davies thought his muse would depart almost thirty years before it did. However, it is fair to say that his poetry deals with a narrow range of subjects – typically nature, social injustice, sex, love, and the lives of vagrants and prostitutes, sometimes in combination – and much of his later verse suffers from a dearth of fresh subject matter or a fresh means of conveying it. Intriguingly, his physical disability is essentially absent from his poetry, and his time in America is only mentioned a few times. What is more, as Brian Waters put it, ‘the scenery of the United States [did not] later find any reflection in the verse of the poet of nature’.²⁰³ The life of the tramp and vagabond remains a touchstone, though as he gets older the poems about such lives are often tinged with the guilt of the comfortable man palpably aware both that he is fortunate, and that his life is missing something.

At first, the success of Davies’s poetry was very much on the back of the Autobiography, and the novelty of a tramp publishing a book of poems undoubtedly appealed to the romantic impulses of contemporary readers. He also had the good fortune to come to prominence in time for Edward Marsh’s five Georgian Poetry anthologies, published between 1912 and 1922. These books were initially very successful, and Davies shared that success; when they became less fashionable after the Great War, his poems shared that fate too, and his later poetry continued to be distinctly Georgian. Davies always had supporters, though, and the diverse array of twentieth-century writers who admired his verse included Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Edith Sitwell, and Robert Frost, who seems to have disliked Davies’s ‘asinine’ behaviour but nevertheless referred to him as ‘a very considerable poet, in spite of several faults and flaws everywhere’.²⁰⁴ It is only in recent decades that his poems have ceased regularly to appear in anthologies.

The following selection is intended to show a broad range of Davies’s strengths as a poet. The poems have been chosen from across his career, though more are included from the earlier books.

The Lodging House Fire ²⁰⁵

My birthday – yesterday,

Its hours were twenty-four;

Four hours I lived lukewarm,

And killed a score.

I woke eight times and rose,

Came to our fire below,

Then sat four hours and watched

Its sullen glow.

Then out four hours I walked,

The lukewarm four I live,

And felt no other joy

Than air can give.

My mind durst know n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• from The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908)
• from Beggars (1909)
• from The True Traveller (1912)
• from A Poet’s Pilgrimage (1918)
• from True Travellers: A Tramp’s Opera in Three Acts (1923)
• from Young Emma (written 1924; published 1980)
• from Later Days (1925)
• from The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp (1926)
• from My Garden and My Birds (1939)
• Miscellaneous Prose
• Selected Poems
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright