St Mary In The Marsh

As I went down to Dymchurch Wall,
I heard the South sing o'er the land.
I saw the yellow sunlight fall
On knolls where Norman churches stand.

I don't know exactly what route John Davidson took on his day trip to Romney Marsh, but St Mary in the Marsh is a Norman church and it stands on a knoll so it seems likely that the charabanc went past it.

Charabanc? No, that's unfair. Davidson was a late Victorian and late Victorian poets walked- and how! There was a romance attached to travelling folk- tinkers and gypsies and tramps. So let's imagine him on foot, perhaps with his dinner tied up in a handkerchief carried on a stick over his shoulder- and wearing some sort of a wide-brimmed hat. The hat is necessary, not only because everyone wore hats back them but also because Davidson was famously bald and the yellow sunlight would have done horrid things to his gleaming pate...

Sorry, I'm not sure why I'm poking fun. I suppose it's because Davidson was a little high flown- and sometimes wore a toupee. But he was a true poet. And a neglected one. Peace be on him.

St Mary the Virgin in St Mary in the Marsh is a lovely church. And largely unspoiled- as most of the Romney Marsh churches are. The Victorians did a bit of restoring but they kept it in bounds. Money was tight, I suppose, and they left the 18th century box pews and the floor tiles as they were- and forebore to fill the windows up with their assertive and insincerely pious stained glass. Here's a picture of the interior, looking east. It's wonderful to have an east window full of clear glass.



And some details:

This brass commemorates Matilde Jayms and is dated 1499.



And this monk- as bald as John Davidson- decorates the sedilia. Thirteenth century? Yes, I think so.

John Davidson

When I was at school we studied a book called 15 Great British Poets- or was it 25 Great British Poets? I forget- and Google isn't helping me remember- which featured generous selections from the chosen names- who were presented in chronological order from Blake to (I think) George Barker. Barker was an eccentric choice but we liked his True Confession because it's filthy. Some of the other choices were eccentric too. Edwin Muir, for instance. And John Davidson. I don't think Davidson should have been admitted to the pantheon when Swinburne and Kipling weren't, but, all the same, I'm happy to have made his acquaintance. Forty Bob A Week is a terrific poem- related to Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads in its use of the vernacular and less disciplined but quite unforgettable. He wrote an enormous amount of stuff- poems, plays, novels, post-Nietzschean philosophy, lots of hackwork- most of it now unread- and out of that huge pile of words a few verses have extracted themselves and are still current.

His contemporaries seem to have liked him, but never took him quite as seriously as he took himself (the toupee may have had something to do with this). He believed in suicide as the ultimate act of self-assertion against an unpitying, godless universe- and acted on this belief by drowning himself in the sea aged 50. The Missing poster issued by the police noted that he affected a goatee and a monocle and "looked like a Frenchman". He has been called the "first modernist" but wasn't. T.S. Eliot admired him. It was an odd life, but by the standards he set himself, not an unsuccessful one.