Villanelle
On her hand she leans her head
By the banks of the busy Clyde;
Our two little boys are in bed.
The pitiful tears are shed;
She has nobody by her side;
On her hand she leans her head.
I should be working; instead
I dream of my sorrowful bride,
And our two little boys in bed.
Were it well if we four were dead?
The grave at least is wide.
On her hand she leans her head.
She stares at the embers red;
She dashes the tears aside,
And kisses our boys in bed.
“God give us our daily bread;
Nothing we ask beside.”
On her hand she leans her head;
Our two little boys are in bed.
From In a Music Hall and Other Poems (1891), this villanelle by the Scottish poet and playwright John Davidson is a family portrait in the form of a monologue voiced by the husband. Expressing the desperation and depression brought about by poverty, the persona may bring the fictional speaker and Davidson himself closer than is immediately apparent. Davidson, married with two sons, underrated as a poet, often struggled to make a living.
Villanelle reflects his inventive formalism. It begins by presenting a metrical challenge. “On her hand she leans her head” can easily be heard as trochaic tetrameter (“On her hand she leans her head”). But it might fit better into the poem’s overall rhythm as a three–beat line, placing the opening stress on “hand” instead of “On” (“On her hand she leans her head”). Still, that first refrain seems to insist on slowing the pace whenever it reappears, and “On her hand she leans her head” evokes the heaviness of the gesture.
The second refrain, “Our two little boys are in bed”, makes an interesting contrast with the first. Thanks to the brisk rhythm, it suggests the children’s faster pulse and less burdened consciousness. Again unlike the first, it undergoes certain changes. In verse three, for instance, it’s revised to a sub-clause, “And our two little boys in bed”. The colloquial formulation emphasises the father’s alarm. The children aren’t set aside by the more casual syntax: instead, their tenuous existence is brought into the foreground.
In line two of the poem (“By the banks of the busy Clyde”) Davidson seems knowingly to understate the relentlessness of the competitive, river-based trades and industry. The line might also be telling us that the woman is out of doors, begging, or searching for food she can afford. The children are at home and the speaker, the unemployed father who “should be working”, is looking after them. Since he “dreams of” his “sorrowful bride”, he may be remembering a gesture that’s already familiar to him, because as the antithesis “sorrowful bride” tells us, distress came early to this married couple
Perhaps, though, the second line line is simply noting where the family lives, and the setting throughout is the narrow interior of their accommodation. Davidson concentrates on his characters’ emotions, and description of the context is minimised. He is especially skilful at evoking the fluctuation between static despair and action, something which hunger and the fear of it would emphasise. The poem might be accused of a sentimental portrayal of poverty, but I would read it rather as a portrayal of the sentiments – the genuine emotions – of a poor family. It’s a generic portrayal but a truthful one.
The fourth verse begins with a desperate question: “Were it well if we four were dead?” The desire to die and to die as a family is one we hear too often today, expressed by people who have given up hope in extreme conditions of famine and bombardment. It is always shocking. The additional comment by the poem’s speaker, “The grave at least is wide”, indicates that the family is wearyingly short of space, perhaps with only a single room for four. Significantly, the refrain-line ending this stanza brings back the wife’s unhappy gesture: it can either suggest she shares her husband’s thoughts, or that her sorrow has contributed to them.
This sorrow-bound trajectory is reversed in the fifth verse when “she dashes her tears aside, / And kisses our boys in bed.” The moment of fiery determination is reflected by the “embers red” still glowing in the hearth. There’s hope, too, in the plea the wife utters the first and only time she speaks. “God, give us our daily bread” echoes the Lord’s Prayer, while the line “Nothing we ask beside” uses her own words. It adds up to a modest request for the absolute minimum of survival.
The villanelle pattern insists on a final paired appearance of the two refrains, so the woman’s head-on-hand gesture and the presence of the little boys in bed continue to be the poem’s ruling images, each gaining strength from proximity. Unlike the river, a villanelle inevitably resists a strong movement forwards. And this is all the better for Davidson’s purposes in moving and motivating his readers. He makes the case for those in the depth of hardship by the depiction of an ordinary husband and wife, suffering inescapably, but maintaining a grip on their powers of resilience and love.