simpler emotions may be
best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older English
literature is pre-eminent, which eschew the fervid rhythms of the
soulful nineteenth century. But he is not merely imitative. Sometimes
in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the
traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with
images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself.

She had two eyes as blue as Heaven,
Ten times as warm they shone;
And yet her heart was hard and cold
As any shell or stone.

Her mouth was like a soft red rose
When Phoebus drinks its dew;
But oh, that cruel thorn inside
Pierced many a fond heart through.

She had a step that walked unheard,
It made the stones like grass;
Yet that light step has crushed a heart,
As light as that step was.

Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips,
I have lived now to prove
Were not for me, were not for me,
But came of her self-love.

Yet, like a cow for acorns that
Have made it suffer pain,
So, though her charms are poisonous,
I moan for them again.

In any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable
extravagance; but not so from Mr. Davies, who knows and loves all
beasts of the field; who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to
tread the grass, so that his "stones like grass" rings freshly, while
the dew-drinking Phoebus is stale.

But if he seems to belong to an older tradition, and to have little in
common with the self-conscious modern poet, that is only because his
life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which
are the intellectual superficies of our time, which distinguish the
culture of one age from the culture of another. He loves with the
strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural
world, the sea, things that grow, and animals and birds. And he is
acquainted with the other unchanging things--love, the desire for
food, hatred of death, friendship. He is also too keen in his
sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense, for instance,
that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him, or that the ugly
facts of modern life have stirred and pained him. There is a great
variety of emotions registered in his poems. There is the grim ballad
called _Treasures_. There is a bold union of magical romanticism and
sensuous passion in the poem beg