This unsentimental portrait of an urban district combines an exacting rationalism with lyric feeling
His poetry was admired by Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and, intermittently, WB Yeats, who knew him from Rhymers' Club meetings, and complained of his "Scottish roughness and exasperation". Hugh MacDiarmid paid him the sincerest tribute as "the only Scottish poet to whom I owe anything at all or to whom I would be pleased to admit any debt".
John Davidson was a rationalist ? perhaps an extreme rationalist ? who made lyric poetry confront ungainly stuff like science and technology and urban poverty. He's another of those underrated Victorian poets whose innovations were fated to be obscured by the blazing sunrise of modernism ? the very movement they foreshadowed. A philosopher, novelist, playwright, translator and journalist, like many writers of the period he wrote too much, and is consequently remembered for too little.
Born in Renfrewshire in 1857, he first became a schoolteacher; then, aged 30, he set out with his wife and sons for London, and toiled in Grub Street for the rest of his working life. After being diagnosed with cancer, he sought refuge in Penzance: he drowned himself in 1909. In The Testament of John Davidson, published the year before his death, he anticipated, and defended, his suicide: "None should outlive his power ... Who kills /Himself subdues the conqueror of kings; /Exempt from death is he who takes his life; /My time has come."
"The newspaper is one of the most important factors moulding the character of contemporary poetry," Davidson boldly claimed, and a number of his poems germinated from reading and writing press reports. His most popular work is the magnificently angry ballad, "Thirty Bob a Week" ("I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw, And set the blooming world a-work for me ... "). Its 16 six-lined stanzas make it a little too long for Poem of the week (although, as a poem, it earns every line) so I've chosen the lesser-known ballad, "A Northern Suburb".
Almost mellow in tone compared with "Thirty Bob", "A Northern Suburb" begins by taking the long, Darwinian view. From romancing the lost rural idyll in the second verse, it progresses to a concise, unsentimental depiction of the hardships of working-class existence. Somehow, there's life even in the poem's shorthand ? those near-clich�s which might easily have been lifted straight from a press report. Davidson compares the workers' ill-designed houses with "ice-chests" in winter and "ovens" in summer. The metaphors are not unusual ? but they get our senses working.
"A Northern Suburb" seems likely to have been set in the heavily industrialised north of England. But, particularly in the description of the narrow little houses, it could portray the effects of rapid expansion on any rural area, even London's suburbs. Nature, evoked as a contrastingly slow-moving force at first, is allowed to be part of the process ("whetted fangs of change") and, interestingly, the close-packed houses are seen as organic growths, with their bright brickwork and "rooting pipes." Davidson always gives the impression of understanding how a building, street or city works. He also knows about the political mechanisms ("the fee'd policeman") underlying the systems. The poem's understated conclusion is especially poignant: to be downtrodden is miserable enough, but to have internalised the oppression and lost every spark of rebellion is pathology. We all still know such people ? "Whose prize for unremitting care/ Is only not to be disgraced." As a condition-of-England poem, "A Northern Suburb" rings bells louder than a Royal wedding, even today.
A Northern Suburb
Nature selects the longest way,
?And winds about in tortuous grooves;
A thousand years the oaks decay;
?The wrinkled glacier hardly moves.
But here the whetted fangs of change
?Daily devour the old demesne ?
The busy farm, the quiet grange,
?The wayside inn, the village green.
In gaudy yellow brick and red,
?With rooting pipes, like creepers rank,
The shoddy terraces o'erspread
?Meadow, and garth, and daisied bank.
With shelves for rooms the houses crowd,
?Like draughty cupboards in a row ?
Ice-chests when wintry winds are loud,
?Ovens when summer breezes blow.
Roused by the fee'd policeman's knock,
?And sad that day should come again,
Under the stars the workmen flock
?In haste to reach the workmen's train.
For here dwell those who must fulfil
?Dull tasks in uncongenial spheres,
Who toil through dread of coming ill,
?And not with hope of happier years ?
The lowly folk who scarcely dare
?Conceive themselves perhaps misplaced,
Whose prize for unremitting care
?Is only not to be disgraced.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/apr/18/poem-of-the-week-john-davidson
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