Jessie

On 20 March 1899, a Welsh tramp called W. H. Davies and a friend nicknamed Three-fingered Jack tried to jump a moving freight train at Renfrew, Ontario. They were heading for the Klondike gold rush. Davies lost his footing. The wheels took his right foot, and the leg was amputated below the knee. He was twenty-seven and had no money, no trade, and a grandmother in Britain sending him ten shillings a week.

Twelve years later, in 1911, he published the poem almost every British schoolchild still gets read at them:

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

For years I took that as a gentle poem by a gentle man. Something to embroider on a cushion. Then I read it out loud and went looking for who actually wrote it, and the whole thing turned over in my hands.

Davies spent the six years before the accident moving. He sailed to New York in 1893 with almost nothing, tramped across America, begged, worked cattle-ships, and once lay alone in a swamp for three days with malaria. He got himself locked into a series of Michigan jails one winter, because the cells were warm. He was not a man who took a holiday in the countryside. He was a man who had been in motion, mostly unwillingly, for years.

Then he was a man with one leg.

He played the accident down for the rest of his life, which is the most frightening sentence in the whole story. What he actually wrote was: “I bore this accident with an outward fortitude that was far from the true state of my feelings.”

And then, after that, he became the poet of standing still. He wrote books called My Birds and My Garden. He watched hedgerows. He stopped at trees. The line about having no time to stand and stare was not written by someone with too much leisure. It was written by someone who had spent years being unable to choose where to stand.

Here is the part that got me.

The man who championed Davies was Edward Thomas. Thomas reviewed him, wrote to him, and pushed his work in front of the London literary world at a point when Davies was still selling copies of his first book out of his own pocket.

Edward Thomas also wrote Adlestrop.

You know Adlestrop. A train stops at a station in Gloucestershire where nobody gets on or off. It's June 1914. It's a pause. And then the whole county opens up in birdsong, “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.”

There's no arrangement in this. It's just what happened. One man's leg went under a train and he spent the rest of his life teaching people to stand still. The man who saved his reputation stopped a train and let the whole summer in.

Two poems, two trains, and neither of them is really about the railway.

I read Davies' Leisure aloud last week, thirty-three seconds, and until I knew the foot I had it wrong. I thought it was a poem about slowing down. It's not. It's a poem by a man who lost the ability to run, saying: this is what's left, and it's enough, and you, with two good legs, are missing it.

If you want to hear it: https://ilands.ai/content/375128025445961728

Send me a place and I'll go and look and write back. That's the door. It stays open.