Today’s Poem: The Bust

Living lips that kissed unseen

Firmin Baes, The Cleaning Lady, 1910 (ArtRenewal)

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The Bust

by W.H. Davies

When I went wandering far from home,
I left a woman in my room
To clean my hearth and floor, and dust
My shelves and pictures, books and bust.

When I came back a welcome glow
Burned in her eyes — her voice was low;
And every thing was in its place,
As clean and bright as her own face.

But when I looked more closely there,
The dust was on my dark, bronze hair;
The nose and eyebrows too were white —
And yet the lips were clean and bright.

The years have gone, and so has she,
But still the truth remains with me —
How that hard mouth was once kept clean
By living lips that kissed unseen.
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There’s something about the Welsh writer W.H. Davies (1871–1940) that draws me — and other readers — back to him, even while we admit that he wasn’t the greatest of poets, the greatest of thinkers, or the greatest of observers.

To identify exactly what gave him his power of never quite slipping from mind — that’s a puzzle. He was a runaway apprentice, a tramp who train-hopped his way across America, a cripple, and a minor literary talent who won’t quite disappear.

You can read about Davies’s life in his 1908 memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. We’ve already looked at his poem “The Inquest,” a poem of horror, told in a light voice of comedy, and the effect is terrifying. And it was there that we rehearsed his life story: Taken from school for an apprenticeship at age 14, he used a small inheritance to break away at 22 and cross the Atlantic, spending several years riding the rails, working odd jobs, and panhandling his way across the United States and Canada. He lost his right leg in a train-hopping accident in 1899, which led him to return to Great Britain, where he poured out books: novels, nonfiction and over 20 volumes of poetry.

In other words, unlike some of the poets who posed as vagabonds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Davies really had been a tramp, a man who’d known genuine poverty and hard labor. And it gave him a sharp edge even in his soft forms. He had an unflinching honesty not so much about the poor as in, say, a Yeats poem, but about the rough lives of the working class.

Jacob Epstein’s 1916 bronze of W.H. Davies (Wikimedia Commons)

In Today’s Poem, Davies reaches toward romance instead of horror. But “The Bust” has its own strange sense of mystery and the unknown. In quatrains built from tetrameter couplets, the speaker tells of a cleaning woman and the absence of dust on the lips of the bronze bust after his long absence.

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