‘Leisure’

W. H. Davies's poem ‘Leisure’, first published in 1911, is still well known and came in the top 20 of the ‘Nation's Favourite Poems’ in a BBC poll in 1995. The BBC's website featuring it, now defunct, had enthusiastic comments from readers all over the world, including India, Pakistan, the United States, Canada, Gambia, Korea, New Zealand, Nigeria and all parts of Great Britain, who cited it as their favourite poem. Many of the posts mentioned that it was ‘their mum's favourite poem’, though one complained ‘I have to use this poem in an expressive arts GCSE. I can't believe the amount of work we have to do!!! As he says we should have more time, so why do we always have so much homework?’ I feel that W. H. Davies would have sympathised.

‘Leisure’ is often seen as characteristic of Davies's best work: simple, lyrical, memorable and emphatically popular. Critically, he is largely ignored, and even in his lifetime was subjected to the sneers and superciliousness of his critical peers. He is often damned as an anachronistic Georgian poet who continued to write pretty nature lyrics in the midst of the upheavals of modernity and the innovations of modernism. Davies is indeed the stalwart of the five exceptionally popular Georgian anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published between 1912 and 1922. When the third one of these appeared in 1918, T. S. Eliot, under the pseudonym of T. S. Apteryx, reviewed it in The Egoist in withering terms: