Thursday 23 September 2021

John Davidson and I

Famously, the poet John Davidson decamped to Penzance in the far west, depressed at his poverty and lack of success. On 23 March 1909 he went into the Star Inn (still there) on Market Jew Street and bought a final whisky and cigar. Then he walked off towards the promenade (the only Victorian prom in Cornwall) and was never seen alive again. Some months later his badly decomposed body was found in Mounts Bay by local fishermen.
   He is often thought of now as the epitome of a bad failed poet but he was no such thing. I was greatly delighted years ago to discover his ballads and lyrics which are the work of a very skilled writer. Perhaps his later epics are more of an acquired taste.

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So, John Davidson, it’s you and I,
   Failing, disabused and ill,
Grey, in tatters like the April sky,
   Rarely joyful, always chill.

Mounts Bay rackets with a full spring tide
   Leaping in the spray-wet air,
Beached, the grey-blanched stones are soaked then dried,
   Fissured by their salt-sharp wear.

Life and love in ballast drove me west,
   Here to wallow like a wreck,
Rather, money’s pinch and critics’ jest
   Forced you to this wind-struck beck:

Wayward tracks like ropes of circumstance
   Bundling travellers to their knees;
Cowed at meaning’s threshold, chance on chance,
   Each was robbed of all self-ease;

Worse for you, possessing self in power,
   Who like Nietzsche, tensed in thought,
Bloomed in corners like a thistle flower
   Starved of that acclaim you sought.

Matter, sole in being, tricked out man,
   Death, you thought, was thus release;
I, in quanta, mind, a theophan,
   Reason found, and not caprice.

Soul-sore, evening dark, you quit the “Star,”
   Whisky-vigoured for the prom,
Full tide set the thrashing waves to war,
   Screaming, they became your tomb.

Months were shriven; your body found horizoned,
   Sunk was given rest; that mesh
Strung of bones and cloth, gone melt and wizened,
   Mocked your creed with stinking flesh.

I, like you, in solitary end
   Longed to quiz the brute-faced waves;
Carnal trust, though bodies age and bend,
   Paused me, whilst the world behaves.

But at last, past death’s breath-frantic sweat,
   Being’s time-shed Present will
Knowledge proffer and its bliss abet,
   Stifling sorrow’s broil to nil.

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© June 2016