W. H. Davies has long been regarded as a nature poet by those only passingly familiar with his name and work, largely on the strength of his two most well-known and frequently anthologised poems, ‘Leisure’ and ‘The Kingfisher’. Both are characteristically ‘Georgian’ poems expressing the pleasure to be found in the natural world and a simple country life. It may well surprise the casual reader to discover, then, that the author of these famous poems, with their unmitigatedly wholesome imagery of our green and pleasant land, should also have written a significant number of poems about its dark urban underbelly: the murder of an illegitimate child, the homeless person huddled in rags and the ills of epidemic prostitution.

For Davies, the quietude of the country offered a physical and psychic respite from the traumas of the city. In ‘In the Country’, the speaker describes how

Davies is aware, however, of his relative privilege in being able to escape ‘the wretched life’, ‘homeless misery’ and ‘ten thousand suffering faces’. The second stanza acknowledges that

Of course, Davies did not depict scenes of human degradation for the sake of cheap sensationalism. On the contrary, he exhibits a uniquely fierce sympathy for these unfortunate figures– unique because he of course knew only too well what it was to be destitute and desperate. In ‘The Bell’, a slight poem imagining a reckoning after death, Davies's speaker concludes: ‘The only things that knew me well / Were children, dogs, and girls that fell’, purposely aligning himself with those in society who are most vulnerable or disregarded. Davies, writes Richard Church in his 1941 essay in Eight for Immortality, is possessed of a ‘fine, clear rage as lucid as his delight, as free as his joy […] a few tramps, a few hungry old beggar women, a cheated prostitute, a brutally used child, a tortured animal; these are the material with which Davies feeds his divine rage’.