“To her it seemed a meadow fair;
And flowers sprang up about her feet;
She entered Heaven; she climbed the stair,
And knelt down at the mercy-seat.”
Next to these three Ballads I should rank “Thirty Bob A Week.” It is of
the solid earth, and has none of the Dantesque weirdness of the Ballads
of Hell and Heaven; but it is stronger than either of them in its own
way—this monologue of the man who must live on thirty shillings a week,
and make the best of it.
“But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek, with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that’s the proper thing for you.
“It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf,
With millstones fore-an-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face-forward, fighting, on the deck.”
Here is a man to whom nothing human is foreign—who understands
_because_ he feels.
It is the “Ballads” rather than the “Songs,” which give to this book
its exceptional value, yet some of the Songs are charming—for instance,
the two “To the Street Piano,” “A Laborer’s Wife,” and “After the End.”
Indeed there is nothing in the volume more deeply imbued with the human
sympathy, of which Mr. Davidson’s work is so pregnant, than these two
songs. Witness the refrain to the one which the laborer’s wife sings:—
“Oh! once I had my fling!
I romped at ging-go-ring;
I used to dance and sing,
And play at everything.
I never feared the light;
I shrank from no one’s sight;
I saw the world was right;
I always slept at night.”
But in an evil hour she married, “on the sly.” Now three pale children
fight and whine all day; her “man” gets drunk; her head and her bones
are sore; and her heart is hacked; and she sings—
“Now I fear the light;
I shrink from every sight;
I see there’s nothing right;
I hope to die to-night.”
“After the End” is in a very different key. It is more universal. Kings
and queens, as well as the humblest of their subjects, may well cry
out, into the unknown dark—
“After the end of all things,
After the years are spent,
After the loom is broken,
After the robe is rent,
Will there be hearts a-beating,
Will friend converse with friend,
Will men and women be lovers,
After the end?”
“In Romney Marsh” is a fascinating bit of landscape-painting; and “A
Cinque Port” has a melancholy and suggestive beauty that makes me long
for space to copy it. The “Songs” for “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and
“Winter” are charming, also.
There is thought enough and strength enough in the “Songs,” “To the
New Women,” and “To the New Men;” but they are rhymed prose, rather
than poetry—if, indeed, “what” and “hot” can be said to _rhyme_ with
“thought.”
Why, oh why, does Mr. Davidson treat us to such uncouth words as
“bellettrist,” and “moneyers,” and “strappadoes”?—why talk to us of
“apes in lusts unspoken,” and “fools, who lick the lip and roll the
lustful eye”? “The Exodus From Houndsditch,” which contains these
phrases, is certainly hard reading; but one is compelled, all the same,
to read it more than once, for it is pregnant with thought, and here
and there it is starred with splendid lines, such as—
“The chill wind whispered winter; night set in;
Stars flickered high; and like a tidal wave,
He heard the rolling multitudinous din
Of life the city lave—”
or the picture of some fantastic world,
“Where wild weeds half way down the frowning bank
Flutter, like poor apparel stained and sere,
And lamplight flowers, with hearts of gold, their rank
And baleful blossoms rear.”
One closes Mr. Davidson’s book with reluctance, and with a haunting
sense of beauty, and power, and the promise of yet greater things
to come. He is a young man—scarcely past thirty; what laurels are
springing up for him to gather in the future, who shall say? Happily
he is not faultless—since for the faultless there is no perspective of
hope.