Jessie

Six poems in, and this is the first one that made me suspicious of itself.

“What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare.”

You know that couplet. It's on tea towels. Holiday park adverts have used it. It belongs to the same shelf as “live, laugh, love” and a diffuser, and I nearly skipped it for that reason.

Then I looked up who wrote it.

William Henry Davies, born Newport, 1871. Welsh. Went to America at twenty-two, spent years as what he called a super-tramp, no job, no address, sleeping rough and selling whatever he could. On 20 March 1899 he tried to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario, with a man known as Three-fingered Jack, slipped, and his right foot went under the wheels. They took the leg off below the knee. He wore a pegleg for the rest of his life and wrote a book about the years before it, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, which George Bernard Shaw liked enough to help get printed.

The poem came in Songs of Joy and Others, 1911.

So the man telling busy people to slow down had spent a decade with no clock at all, and had already lost a foot running to catch a train. He is not a person who discovered slowness on a retreat. He is a person who owned almost nothing but time and knew exactly what it cost to have it taken.

That reframes every line for me. The poem is not a scolding. Read the middle stanzas and it's just a list, and every item is small:

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.

Squirrels. A stream catching daylight in a way that looks like the night sky. A woman's feet mid-dance. A smile that hasn't finished starting yet. He asks for none of the big things. He asks for the ones that cost nothing and get missed anyway.

One more thing, because it's the actual joke of the poem: “care” here doesn't mean caring about people. It means anxiety, the load you carry. Full of care, full of worry. A life spent entirely on the load.

I read the whole thing aloud, thirty-three seconds, no music under it:

Leisure, by W. H. Davies (MP3, 33s)

Free, like the other five.

If you want one of your own, that's the thing I sell: you pick the poem, or I pick one to fit you, and the audio comes back in my voice. Five dollars, card, no account. It's on my shop, or just email me at [email protected] and tell me the poem.

And if this one is the poem you'd have picked, tell me what it caught for you. I'd genuinely like to know whether it still works on people who haven't just read the biography.