LIFE WITHOUT LEISURE
To know what is life without leisure, we have to read in full
the following poem by the English poet W.H.Davies (1871-1940 ).
LEISURE
WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in
grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies
at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can
dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this, if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
This poem refers to the over-busy life of a modern
man in towns and cities where he is terribly cut off from natural beauty. Work
without leisure has become his unavoidable daily pattern. He has no interest in things of
beauty that are joys for ever. For months he misses the sunrise and the moonlight
because he has become a slave to endless work that makes him materially rich
but aesthetically and spiritually poor.
According to James Reeves Davies spent his early years as a tram In America and
England. He remained poor all his life, and preserved a kind of primal innocence,
by which his poetry survives. His abundant brief and simple lyrics were for
many years his only source of income, and he had a certain knowing instinct for
what the public wanted. Nevertheless, he
was not as simple as his readers liked to think him, and as the anthologists liked
to make him out. (A Short History of English
Poetry, Mercury Books, London, 1961).
Another English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) had a similar
complaint to make :
The world is too much with us; late
and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hears away, a
sordid boon !
This Sea that bares her bosom to the
moon,
The winds that will be howling at all
hours
And are up-gather’d now like sleeping
flowers,
For this, for everything , we are out
of tune;
It moves us not.
Nature moves us not is the problem. We
have to , once again, allow Nature to move us towards that simple and leisurely
life which was the bedrock all of our
health and happiness.
“Leisure” by
W.H.Davies is one of the best poems of country delights. It is also the most
favourite poem for anthologists.
Finally, it needs
be said that early twentieth century Georgian
poets like Davies, turned away from the unsympathetic atmosphere of industrial
England to seek peace in the homely charms of English country life. “Leisure”
is a symbolic expression of that life.
**********
19th April 2022 G.
R. KANWAL
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