Article in Stretton Focus, September 2013
Some of you reading this article will recognise the title as coming from a poem by WH Davies. You may also be able to fill in along the dotted line with the words “…if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.”
During his lifetime (1871-1940) WH Davies had plenty of time to stand and stare, because he chose to spend his early years living as a tramp, roaming round both England and America (having stowed away on a cattle-ship at Liverpool.)
He eventually wrote his life story in a book called ‘The Autobiography of a super-Tramp’ and a very informative and interesting read it is too! He was educated, not in a classroom but in the school of life. It seems that he was born with the gift of poetry in his blood. He would go round, knocking on doors offering to sell sheets of his hand-written poetry for a few pence, in order to keep body and soul together.
He came to the notice of George Bernard Shaw, who recognised his genius, and encouraged him to persevere. Shaw said that “his poems are like a draught of clear water in a desert.” Shaw also wrote a preface to the autobiography, which increased its sales, and eventually made the poet a man of independent means.
Many people since, have asked the same question as the poem ‘What is this life?’ and they have come up with different answers. Is it ‘just a bowl of cherries?’ Is it ‘a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ Or is it something else?
By and large, we all have to decide for ourselves what this life is all about. Is it just a matter of ‘earning pennies’ in order to keep body and soul together? Or could we take advice from the poet, and look a bit deeper into our experiences, and discover for example ‘streams full of stars, like skies at night’. Should we take time (or make time) to ‘stand and stare?’ Try to look through what’s visible and feel the invisible: see through the physical and discover the riches of the spiritual? These are there in everybody’s life: for as another poet has said ‘we are made in the image and likeness of God’.
Donald Horsfield
