Foliage: Various Poems — Key Ideas to Explore

Weather as Mental Landscape

Davies uses weather—especially thunderstorms, rain, and fog—to externalize emotional and creative states. In the opening poem, "Thunderstorms," the speaker's thoughts are "drooping flowers" and "sulking, silent birds" until the storm "rain[s] me words," transforming them into "dancing flowers" and "joyful singing birds." This pattern repeats: in "The Fog," fog becomes a physical presence that obscures vision, while in "Winter's Beauty," cold and snow are rendered as aesthetic objects. The weather is never merely descriptive; it always carries psychological weight. Even in "A Greeting," the speaker hails the sun as a friend who "owns the gold" and "spending has no end," making sunlight a form of wealth. This consistent personification of weather elements gives the collection a unified sensory vocabulary, where inner life is always reflected in the sky.

Birds as Figures of Freedom and Constraint

Birds appear throughout Foliage as symbols of both liberation and limitation. In "Thunderstorms," the speaker's thoughts are first "sulking, silent birds" and then "joyful singing birds," equating mental state with avian behavior. "Sweet Birds, I Come" addresses birds directly, and in "When the Cuckoo Sings," the cuckoo's call marks a seasonal shift that prompts the speaker to "shun those haunts where men are found." Yet birds are also trapped: in "The Bird-Man," a man who mimics birds is presented as a figure of failed escape. The most complex use occurs in "Return to Nature," where the speaker says he will "fly / To green things, like a bird"—but this flight is motivated by cowardice, not strength. Birds thus embody the central tension of the collection: the desire for freedom versus the reality of constraint, whether social, economic, or emotional.

The City as a Wound

Davies's city is not a place of opportunity but of injury. In "Return to Nature," the speaker recalls a city where "my soul's leaves sought the human face, / And not the Sun's for warmth and light— / And so was never free from blight." The city inflicts a kind of spiritual frostbite: "My mind was burned by poor men's eyes, / And frozen by poor women's sighs." This paradox—burning and freezing—captures the city's destructive effect. The poem lists urban horrors with relentless specificity: men who "freeze for want of cloth" while others "dress in satin, fur or silk," and "fine rich ladies wash in milk" while "starving mothers have no food." The city is a place of "hot dreams from harlots' faces" and "savage lust." Davies does not offer solutions; he simply records the damage and then turns away. The city remains a wound that the poems cannot heal, only flee.

Movement Between Scenes

The collection's structure is built on abrupt shifts between urban and rural settings, often within a single poem. In "Return to Nature," the speaker moves from a catalog of city miseries to a pastoral scene where he reclines on a "soft green bank" watching deer. This transition is not gradual but declarative: "No more I'll walk those crowded places." Similarly, "A Strange City" juxtaposes the familiar with the alien, while "Sweet Stay-at-Home" contrasts the speaker's imagined travels with the beloved's rootedness. The poems themselves are short—most under twenty lines—and their brevity enacts the quick movement of attention. Davies uses the stanza break as a hinge: in "Strong Moments," the first stanza describes social pleasures, the second pivots to "the strongest moment of my life / Is when I think about the poor." This structural habit of turning from one scene to another mirrors the speaker's restless consciousness, always scanning between comfort and conscience.

Readers approaching Foliage will find a collection that rewards attention to its recurring imagery and structural patterns. The poems are best read in sequence, as Davies builds a cumulative argument about the relationship between inner life and outer world. Notice how the same images—birds, storms, leaves—reappear in different contexts, gaining new meanings. The collection's brevity (about 45 minutes of reading) invites multiple passes; a second reading reveals the careful architecture beneath the seemingly simple lyrics.

Sometimes I think about how Davies could make a single trembling leaf carry the weight of a whole city winter, and it makes me want to revisit that old household edition again, the one where the poems feel softer around the edges—Poems Household Edition — Reading Notes—as if the storm outside has quieted to a murmur, and we're just left with the hush.