W. H. Davies
Welsh · 19th-20th century
Welsh poet and writer, associated with the Georgian poets, whose best-known poem Leisure opens "What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare".
Connection to Taylor Swift
Surfaced by a community reader against the closing question of seven's first verse. Davies's complaint is that adult life removes the capacity for looking; seven asks the same question from inside the memory of having had it.
Notable Works
- Leisure, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, Songs of Joy
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Leisure
“Are there still beautiful things?”
Picked up by a community reader who sets the poem's closing question against Davies's Leisure, quoting "we have no time to stand and stare" and "no time to see, in broad daylight, / Streams full of stars, like skies at night". Davies writes as an adult complaining that the capacity for looking has been taken by work. seven asks the question from the other side of the same loss - from inside the memory of a child who had nothing but time to look, wondering whether what she saw is still out there. Both poems treat attention as the faculty that goes first, and both decline to answer the question they raise.