Recently I have been reading A History of Modern Poetry by David Perkins, Harvard University Press, and rediscovered many a familiar poet that I haven’t read in ages. John Davidson was one though I probably could not have told you more than he was “poet with Eliot connections” but that was about all.
The painting The Anger of Achilles (from the Iliad) c. 1819 now at the Kimble Art Institute in Dallas is by French Neoclassicist Jacques Louis David. It thought by many to be a comment on Emperor Napoleon’s dismissal of Josephine.
Luckily Prof. Perkins filled in the details and gave a stanza from one of Davidson’s better poems, 30 Bob a Week. Of course doing a lot of poets, like a lot of anything is tedious, but some minors peppered with the greats should prove interesting fare.
Notice he has no air in chart. His North Node is conjunct his Part of Fortune at 29 Pisces 57 that is in turn conjunct Neptune 21 Pisces 17 that starts off the bundle parade. Neptune is trine his Moon that is trine his Saturn, giving him a Grand Trine in Water. Since the Moon is at the bottom of the chart in the Northern hemisphere, this makes Davidson use every emotion that he encounters as fodder for his poetry / writing life.
Since his moon is in the third house of Scorpio and the essential house of airy Gemini, makes his writing emotive and dark with a reductionist tinge. The North Node in the eighth house in Aries is sextile the essential lord’s Martian ruler, making him embrace the practical side of life to the extent that the spiritual questions of life and death are ignored.
The Dragon’s tail is in the first decan of Libra and in the second house, often hints at a career choice that leads to poverty that he stubbornly chooses because of his refusal to accept advice. See the singer Susannah McCorkle for a similar outlook.
Davidson and Eliot
John Davidson was the son of a Presbyterian minister and born in Barhead, Scotland. He wrote for several newspapers, but in the 1890s devoted himself to verse. He was married with 2 children. He had a rather strange compulsion about “getting cancer” and when he did, he left his wife and his family and went to Cornwall to commit suicide. They buried him at sea with another strange request: they could not anthologize his poems until the copyright ran out. This left his wife and children penniless.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, aka TS Eliot, the Great American poet, liked Davidson because the Scot was one of the first “Moderns” to write in slang. This is highlighted by Davidson’s moon in the 3rd house at 15 Scorpio 38 — making his writing more attuned to sound than prose — as a good poet should be but the kicker is it is opposite via a translation of light (from Mars) to Uranus in Taurus making that sound not high and literary but common and offbeat i.e. slang. With his Midheaven at 26 Taurus 05 conjunct and Venus partile, suggesting as he traveled, he squirreled away bits and bobs of language for future use.
Still, that stellium in the 9th house is troubling even with Jupiter there with his firm belief in nothing, that the ethereal netherworld of thought, philosophy and poesy that he embraced left him empty. The fixed signs near the 10th, help fasten him some, but with only the Moon opposite and that with Mars only supported his very bleak, nihilistic view (sextile Saturn in the 11th).
Merlin and Kassandra
His Yod from Mars to Saturn holds out little promise, pointing as it does to 07 Sagittarius and the Asteroid Kassandra from Homer’s great poem the Iliad as she portends the Trojans falls if they allow the gift from Greeks within their walls.
That is supported by another wizard of fortune, the fabled English Merlin, a fictitious character from the Bard Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Merlin is well known for his many prophecies of the One and Future King of England, Arthur and the Holy Grail, and in Davidson’s chart is right next to his ascendant. Fatalistic to the core, Davidson like astrologer Jerome Cardan had always feared the hand of cancer as it foretold death and when he received a diagnosis of the curse, fled to Cornwall to make it so.
For the record, Cardano did not die from cancer, but because he had prophesied his death on a certain day, and to prove himself right, did.
The Loafer by John Davidson
I hang about the streets all day,
At night I hang about;
I sleep a little when I may,
But rise betimes the morning’s scout;
For through the year I always hear
Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.
My clothes are worn to threads and loops;
My skin shows here and there ;
About my face like seaweed droops
My tangled beard, my tangled hair;
From cavernous and shaggy brows
My stony eyes untroubled stare.
I move from eastern wretchedness
Through Fleet Street and the Strand;
And as the pleasant people press
I touch them softly with my hand,
Perhaps I know that still I go
Alive about a living land.
For far in front the clouds are riven
I hear the ghostly cry,
As if a still voice fell from heaven
To where sea-whelmed the drowned folk lie
In sepulchres no tempest stirs
And only eyeless things pass by.
In Piccadilly spirits pass:
Oh, eyes and cheeks that glow!
Oh, strength and comeliness! Alas,
The lustrous health is earth I know
From shrinking eyes that recognise,
No brother in my rags and woe.
I know no handicraft, no art,
But I have conquered fate;
For I have chosen the better part,
And neither hope, nor fear, nor hate.
With placid breath on pain and death,
My certain alms alone I wait.
And daily, nightly, comes the call,
The pale unechoing note.
The faint “Aha!” sent from the wall
Of heaven, but from no ruddy throat
Of human breed or seraph’s seed,
A phantom voice that cries by rote
