[In the following essay, Schirmer considers the role of religion in Davie's work.]

Even a casual reading of the poetry and criticism of Donald Davie must notice the important place that religion, specifically the Dissenting tradition in England, has always held in his work. Most obviously, a number of the poems in the Collected Poems 1950-1970 concern the Dissenting tradition in general, while others express Davie's own ambiguous response to the particular, Baptist faith in which he was brought up. Moreover, the aesthetic principles that have guided and informed both Davie's poetry and criticism—such ‘classical’ standards as restraint and sparseness, for example—clearly owe something to the rigorous ethical and aesthetic principles of Nonconformity.

In recent years, Davie's concern with religion has become altogether more urgent and personal. Not only are more and more of his poems concerned with religion, but also they have become decidedly religious in nature, informed by—or indeed intent on expressing—a firm sense of religious belief. And in his criticism, Davie has turned increasingly towards religious writers, especially those working within the Dissenting tradition. This new direction in Davie's writing, and the reasons for it, cannot be overlooked in any estimation of Davie's current work, and certainly not in any attempt to project where Davie is likely to go during the next few years.

Davie was born into a family in which Dissent was deeply ingrained. His paternal grandfather was a Baptist deacon and lay preacher, and his father, although less fervent than his grandfather, was an active and regular member of the Sheffield Road Baptist Church in Barnsley, taking his son to chapel with him each Sunday. Davie's mother's family also was Nonconformist. Nevertheless, Davie did not go through with the important adolescent ritual of Believer's or Adult Baptism, and drifted, in his late teens, into various shades of unbelief. (While an undergraduate at Cambridge he did, however, join the Robert Hall Society, an association of Baptist students.) By the time he came back, in 1946, from a tour of duty in the Royal Navy, he had lost his religious faith altogether, and for the next twenty years vacillated between agnosticism and an extremely tepid Anglicism (the religion practised by his wife). In the late 1960s, partly because of the death of his parents and of some close friends, Davie began re-evaluating his spiritual life, and in 1969, while at Stanford University, he began attending Christchurch Episcopalian Church in Los Altos Hills, California. He was baptized into the American Episcopalian Church in 1972.¹

Davie's response to his upbringing as a Baptist, at least as it is recorded in his poetry, is coloured by social as well as religious feelings. (Davie's grandfather was a railway signalman, both his grandmothers had been domestic servants, his father was a shopkeeper, and his mother was, in his own words, ‘born in a colliery cottage’.²) The class associations of the Dissenting tradition clearly lie behind such lines as these from ‘Barnsley and District’ (Events and Wisdoms):

The parish primary school where a mistress once
Had every little Dissenter stand on the bench
With hands on head, to make him out a dunce;
Black backs of flourmills, wafer-rusted railings
Where I ran and ran from colliers' boys in jerseys,
Wearing a blouse to show my finer feelings—
These still stand. And Bethel and Zion Baptist,
Sootblack on pavements foul with miners' spittle
And late-night spew and violence, persist.(3)

When Davie addresses the religious, as distinct from the social, dimensions of his Dissenting background, he does so with the subtlety, irony, and intellectual reserve that characterize much of his earliest poetry. An example is‘The Evangelist’, published in Davie's first book of poems, Brides of Reason:

‘My brethren …’ And a bland, elastic smile
Basks on the mobile features of Dissent.
No hypocrite, you understand. The style
Befits a church that’s based on sentiment.
Solicitations of a swirling gown,
The sudden vox humana, and the pause,
The expert orchestration of a frown
Deserve, no doubt, a murmur of applause.
The tides of feeling round me rise and sink;
Bunyan, however, found a place for wit.
Yes, I am more persuaded than I think;
Which is, perhaps, why I disparage it.
You round upon me, generously keen:
The man, you say, is patently sincere.
Because he is so eloquent, you mean?
That test was never patented, my dear.
If, when he plays upon our sympathies,
I’m pleased to be fastidious, and you
To be inspired, the vice in it is this:
Each does us credit, and we know it too.

This is the side of Dissent that Davie finds unpalatable. Indeed, in A Gathered Church, a study of the Dissenting tradition, he argues strenuously that this emotional strain in Dissent is, in fact, merely a strain, and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, figures like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley were closer to the intellectually rigorous Augustan temperament of Alexander Pope than to the decidedly anti-intellectual evangelicalism portrayed in this poem.⁴ And ‘The Evangelist’ is clearly the work of a poet who finds the temperament of Alexander Pope congenial; the poem's tightly controlled metric and stanzaic regularity, the complex syntax of the final, revealing stanza, and the tendency toward qualification (‘Deserve, no doubt, a murmur of applause’ and ‘Which is, perhaps, why I disparage it’) all bespeak a strong intellectual presence. But ‘The Evangelist’ is more than a sceptic's view of evangelicalism. What is most striking about the poem, in fact, is its honesty—the narrator's admission of being affected by this blatantly emotional appeal and the recognition that his fastidious response (felt in the rhythm and syntax of the poem) must itself be counted, at least in part, a vice.

The four-poem sequence ‘Dissentient Voice’ (A Winter Talent) expresses Davie's response to the religion of his upbringing in a more thorough and more personal way than does ‘The Evangelist’. The first poem, ‘A Baptist Childhood’, deliberately echoes Dylan Thomas's ‘Fern Hill’ to emphasize the strong streak of puritanism in Dissent:

When some were happy as the grass was green,
I was as happy as a glass was dark,
Chill eye beneath the chapel floor unseen
Most of the year, a mystery, the Ark.
Aboveboard rose the largely ethical
Glossy-with-graining pulpit; underground
The older Scriptures trembled for the Fall
And lapped at Adam with a sucking sound.
Grass-rooted goodness and a joy unmixed
Parch unbaptized inside a droughty head;
Arcadia's floor is not so firmly fixed
But it must tremble to a pastor's tread.

This view of Dissent as a religion intent on denying the inherent goodness and beauty of human existence is reinforced in the second and third poems of the sequence, which describe the tension between Nonconformity and the arts. But this is by no means ‘Dissentient Voice’'s last word on religion. A much more complex and ambiguous attitude surfaces in the fourth poem, ‘A Gathered Church’. Addressed to Davie's grandfather, the Baptist deacon and lay preacher, it opens by drawing a distinction between Davie the poet and his grandfather the man of religion:

Deacon, you are to recognize in this
The idlest of my avocations, fruit
Of some late casual studies and my need
(Not dire, nor much acknowledged as a claim
Upon your known munificence) for what
You as lay preacher loved and disavowed,
The mellow tang of eloquence—a food
I have some skill in rendering down from words
Suppose them choice and well-matured. I heard
Such from your bee-mouth once. A tarnished sun
Swirling the motes which swarmed along its shaft
Mixed soot with spices, and with honey, dust;
And memories of that winning unction now
Must countenance this application. For
I see them tumbled in a frowzy beam,
The grains of dust or pollen from our past,
Our common stock in family and church,
Asking articulation. These affairs
Touched you no doubt more nearly; you are loath
To see them made a gaud of rhetoric. But, sir,
I will deal plainly with you. They are past,
Past hoping for as you had hoped for them
For sixty years or more the day you died,
And if I seem a fribble in this case
No matter. For I will be eloquent
And on these topics, having little choice.

As a poet, Davie writes not to assert the religious values held and preached by his grandfather—values that are now ‘Past hoping for as you had hoped for them’—but rather with a purely aesthetic aim (‘The mellow tang of eloquence’), something that his grandfather, because of his religious convictions, had to disavow. Religion, from this point of view, is so much grist for the mill:

So here I take the husk of my research,
A form of words—the phrase, ‘a gathered church’,
A rallying cry of our communions once
For you perhaps still stirring, but for me
A picturesque locution, nothing more
Except for what it promises, a tang.

Moreover, as an unbeliever, Davie sees his grandfather's religion as fundamentally anti-humanistic:

‘A gathered church.’ That posy, the elect,
Was gathered in, not into, garden-walls;
For God must out of sheer caprice resect
The jugular stalks of those He culls and calls.

The reference to the church body as protected by garden-walls recalls (partly by means of the change from blank verse to alternating rhyme) Isaac Watts's ‘The Church the Garden of Christ’, the first stanza of which sets forth this metaphor:

We are a Garden wall’d around,
Chosen and made peculiar Ground;
A little Spot inclos’d by Grace
Out of the World's wide Wilderness.(5)

The distinction that Davie's poem insists on between the flowers of the elect being gathered in rather than into the garden walls reflects the view of the Dissenting tradition expressed in the three earlier poems of ‘Dissentient Voice’; rather than being brought into the desired protection of a ‘Chosen and peculiar Ground’, the flowers are cut and collected, torn away from their roots in the world of human affairs. Moreoever, this is done by God apparently ‘out of sheer caprice’.

In a note included in his Collected Poems, Davie describes ‘A Gathered Church’ as a poem in which he works through to ‘an apprehension of Dissent as embodied and made concrete in the personality of my grandfather’. And here is where Davie's poem becomes complex and ambiguous. The vivid and very human memory of his grandfather that surfaces in the final stanza of the poem tempers the hostile view of religion expressed, in various ways, from the beginning of ‘Dissentient Voice’, and in the closing lines of the poem, the generous and affectionate nature of his grandfather is set against the life-denying qualities that Davie earlier attributes to the garden of Dissent:

Now all the churches gathered from the world
Through that most crucial bottleneck of Grace,
That more than hourglass, being waspish, waist
Where all the flutes of love are gathered in,
The girdle of Eternity, the strait
Too straitened for the sands and sons of Time,
More mean and private than the sticking-place
Of any partial loyalties—all these
In you, dear sir, are justified. Largesse,
Suppose it but of rhetoric, endears,
Disseminated quite at large to bless
The waste, superb profusion of the spheres.

But these lines do more than simply reject the confining ‘waist’ of Grace's bottleneck for the munificence of Davie's grandfather and for the quality of ‘Largesse’ in general (including the rhetorical largesse of the poet); they also recognize, especially in the ambiguous word ‘justified’, that the very qualities that Davie finds so admirable in his grandfather depend, to some extent at least, on the religious convictions that he held. To the degree that, as Davie says in his note, his grandfather embodies his own perception of Dissent, ‘Dissentient Voice’ does not merely attack the institution and doctrines of Nonconformity, but rather sees through the abstraction to its human manifestations, and finds there the very qualities of life that Davie himself, as a poet and unbeliever, cherishes.

Notwithstanding the respect that Davie expresses for the Dissenting tradition as embodied in his grandfather, ‘Dissentient Voice’ disavows any religious conviction on Davie's part, and hints at no spiritual void in his own life. In his poems of the late 1960s and after, however, this apparent complacency about religion—as about many other matters—is called into question. One poem that reflects the wavering between unbelief and belief that Davie experienced in the years before his conversion is ‘The North Sea’ (Essex Poems). As such, it marks a transition between poems like ‘Dissentient Voice’ and Davie's recent religious poetry:

North Sea, Protestant sea,
I have come to live on your shore
In the low countries of England.
                              A shallow gulf north-westward
Into the Isle of Ely
And the Soke of Peterborough
Is one long arm of the cold vexed sea of the North.
Having come to this point, I dare say
That every sea of the world
Has its own ambient meaning:
The Mediterranean, archaic, pagan;
The South Atlantic, the Roman Catholic sea.
But somewhere in mid-America
All of this grows tiresome,
The needles waver and point wildly
And then they settle and point
Somewhere on the ridge of the Andes
And the Rocky Mountains
True to the end of the world.
Pacific is the end of the world,
Pacific, peaceful.
And I do not know whether to fear
More in myself my bent to that end or
The vast polyp rising and beckoning,
Christ, grey-green, deep in the sea off Friesland.

The poles in this poem are not merely the old world and the new, Essex and California, although this dichotomy surely lies behind the poem. (It was written while Davie was at the University of Essex, some time after he had spent a year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and just before he went to Stanford.) Davie is struggling here between the easy secularism that had defined most of his spiritual life as an adult—the kind of secularism in which all thought of religion merely ‘grows tiresome’ and which is associated, in Davie's mind at least, with California—and a religious faith that, especially as expressed in the poem's final image, threatens to disrupt the rather effortless unbelief that he had drifted into and had come to accept as natural.

It is more than coincidence that finds ‘The North Sea’ in Essex Poems. That collection, along with ‘More Essex Poems 1964-1968’ and the long poem entitled ‘England’ written about the same time, reflect the general crisis of identity and allegiance that Davie experienced in the late 1960s, especially through four troubled years as Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex. And if one can argue that the sense of national disaffection and loss expressed in many of the Essex poems (and in Davie's decision to leave England in 1968) helped crystallize Davie's political and social views—his conservative rejection of socialist England, for example, and his often strident attacks on the libertine and liberal tendencies of the late 1960s in general—then one might also suggest that those feelings may well have had something to do with Davie's movement during this period towards the fixed principles of religious orthodoxy, culminating in his conversion to the American Episcopalian Church in 1972.

In any event, the religious poems that Davie has written since the 1960s, and particularly since joining the Episcopalian Church, stand decidedly apart from his earlier poems about religion, having at their centre deeply felt religious convictions. And yet they are not, in style and attitude, wholly unlike ‘Dissentient Voice’. As a poem like ‘Having No Ear’ (published in 1979⁶) makes clear, Davie's recent religious poetry does not propose to abandon a belief in human intellect for a mystical, anti-intellectual religious faith:

Having no ear, I hear
And do not hear the piano-tuner ping,
Ping, ping one string beneath me here, where I
Ping-ping one string of Caroline English to
Tell if Edward Taylor tells
The truth, or no.
Dear God, such gratitude
As I owe thee, for giving, in default
Of a true ear or of true holiness,
This trained and special gift of knowing when
Religious poets speak themselves to God,
And when, to men.
The preternatural! I know it when
This perfect stranger—angel-artisan—
Knows how to edge our English Upright through
Approximations back to rectitude,
Wooing it back through quarter-tone
On quarter-tone, to true.
Mystical? I abjure the word, for if
Such faculty is known and recognized
As may tell sharp from flat, and both from true,
And I lack that capacity, can I say
That Edward Taylor's Paradise was seen
By other light than day?

This poem is certainly religious in a way that ‘Dissentient Voice’ is not. For one thing, it takes a different view of religious art; the poet's concern here is not merely aesthetic (‘the mellow tang of eloquence’), but, rather, pointedly religious. All the deliberately self-conscious playfulness of the first stanza, for example—itself a kind of poetic tuning-up, with its numerous rhymes and echoes—comes to rest on the question of whether a Christian poet like Edward Taylor ‘tells / The truth or no’. But although ‘Having No Ear’ is religious in what it has to say, and in the assumptions that inform it, it is, after all, extraordinarily intellectual in manner; in fact, the poem rests on a fairly complex logical argument: if the piano-tuner, unlike the narrator, can know the true note on a musical scale and, moreover, can find it by rational, measured means (‘Approximations to rectitude’), and if the critic can know, also through rational means, ‘when / Religious poets speak to God, / And when to men’, then who is to say that the truth of religion, even of a religion as seemingly anti-rational as that of the strict Calvinist Edward Taylor, cannot be known by other than mystical means, cannot exist, that is, in the light of human rationality? If this paraphrase seems overly syllogistic, that is only to call attention to the poem's insistence, through its very structure, on logical coherence, and to its insistence that rationality and religious faith can coexist.

Nonetheless, a poem that expresses deeply felt religious convictions is not likely to manifest the kind of ironic distancing and intellectual qualifications that characterize a poem like ‘The Evangelist’. And several of Davie's recent poems depend on personal voice and emotional intensity in a way quite alien to much of his earlier work dealing with religion. An example is ‘Devil on Ice’:

Called out on Christmas Eve for a working party,
Barging and cursing, carting the wardroom's gin
To save us all from sin and shame,
through snow,
The night unclear, the temperature subzero,
                                                            Oh I was a bombardier
                                                            For any one's Angry Brigade
That Christmas more than thirty years ago!
Later, among us bawling beasts was born
The holy babe, and lordling Lucifer
With Him alas, that blessed morn. And so
Easy it was I recognize and know
                                                            Myself the mutineer
                                                            Whose own stale bawdry helped
Salute the happy morn, those years ago.
Red Army Faction could have had me then—
Not an intrepid operative, but glib,
A character-assassin primed to go,
Ripe for the irreplaceable though low
                                                            Office of pamphleteer.
                                                            Father of lies, I knew
My plausible sire, those Christmases ago.
For years now I have been amenable,
Equable, a friend to law and order,
Devil on ice. Comes Christmas Eve … and lo!
A babe we laud in baby-talk. His foe
                                                            And ours, not quite his peer
                                                            But his Antagonist,
Hisses and walks on ice, as long ago.(7)

The poem draws on Davie's experiences in the north of Russia during his service in the Royal Navy and, in its sharply self-accusing tone, is of a piece with the recent and justly admired ‘In the Stopping Train’.⁸ But ‘Devil on Ice’ is quite explicitly about the religious problem of sin, and depends less on psychological insight and reflection than on conventional religious distinctions between good and evil.

Davie has said that the one religious doctrine that he held to, even in his unbelief, was that of original sin and man's innate depravity.⁹ This belief, which is quite in keeping with Davie's affinities for classical restraint rather than romantic afflatus, surfaces in much of his recent poetry, including, of course, ‘Devil on Ice’. Another example is ‘Livingshayes’, a poem much closer than ‘Devil on Ice’ to Davie's own definition of Christian poetry as that which ‘appeals, either explicitly or by plain implication (and in whatever spirit—rebelliously for instance, or sardonically, as often with Emily Dickinson) to some one or more of the distinctive doctrines of the Christian church: to the Incarnation pre-eminently, to Redemption, Judgment, the Holy Trinity, the Fall.’¹⁰ The Christian doctrine that ‘Livingshayes’ is concerned with is that of sin and redemption:

‘Live-in-ease’, and then to wash
                    Their sins in Lily Lake
On Holy Thursday, for their own
                    And their Redeemer's sake.
Easy living, with that clear
                    And running stream below;
First contract the harm, and then
                    Wash it white as snow.
Not altogether. Chris Cross first,
                    The top of a high hill’.
Living it up and easy needs
                    Him hung and bleeding still.

Like many of Davie's poems, ‘Livingshayes’ is rooted in a specific place. (The poem includes a note indicating that the ritual of bathing on Holy Thursday in Lily Lake, a small pond near the village of Silverton in Devon, is historically real, and Chris Cross is, in fact, the name of a hill overlooking the village and the lake.) But the poem quite obviously transcends its locale to make a statement about the doctrine of redemption. Moreover, as the final stanza and especially the final line insist, the poem emphasizes man's sinful part in the redemptive process far more than it does God's saving part; ‘Livingshayes’ calls attention not just to the notion that Christ's death saved man, but also to the related idea that man's sins caused and, more important, continue to cause Christ's suffering (‘Him hung and bleeding still’).

As might be expected of a writer whose criticism and poetry have always gone hand in hand, the preoccupation with religion found in Davie's poetry of the past few years has a marked, though somewhat differently focused, corollary in his recent criticism. In contrast to his earlier critical support for the work of Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy—one a non-Christian theist and one a non-believer—Davie has spent much of his critical energy recently investigating the literature that has come out of the Dissenting tradition, and arguing, characteristically, for a reevaluation of it.

The central document here is A Gathered Church. In this book, Davie argues that writers like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley were essentially men of reason, not emotion and intuition, and that the Dissenting tradition, at its best, was not hostile to the arts.¹¹ In fact, Davie argues, Dissent worked in and advanced the admirable aesthetic tradition of ‘simplicity, sobriety, and measure’:

Just here, in fact, is where negative virtues become positive ones. And this is true not just of Calvinist art but of all art, not just of Calvinist ethics but of all ethics. The aesthetic and the moral perceptions have, built into them and near to the heart of them, the perception of licence, of abandonment, of superfluity, foreseen, even invited, and yet in the end denied, fended off. Art is measure, is exclusion; is therefore simplicity (hard-earned), is sobriety, tense with all the extravagances that it has been tempted by and has denied itself.¹²

And in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, Davie argues that this aesthetic is especially appropriate for religious poetry, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins notwithstanding:

For when a poet chooses a style, or chooses between styles, he is making a choice in which his whole self is involved—including, if he is a Christian poet, that part of himself which is most earnestly and devoutly Christian. The question is, for him: what sort of language is most appropriate when I would speak of, or to, my God? And it is not only the puritans among poets who appear to have decided that the only language proper for such exalted purposes is a language stripped of fripperies and seductive indulgences, the most direct and unswerving English. To speak thus plainly has the additional advantage that it ought to be meaningful to plain men and women, the poet's fellow-Christians; but the main reason for choosing it is that when speaking to God, in poetry as in prayer, any sort of prevarication or ambiguity is unseemly, indeed unthinkable.¹³

The connection between Davie's defence of Watts and Wesley and the aesthetic principles that he has upheld in his own writing is obvious. More specifically, the criterion advanced here for religious poetry—that it be written in a plain rather than ornate or ambiguous style—also describes Davie's own recent religious poetry. Although poems like ‘Having No Ear’, ‘Devil on Ice’ and ‘Livingshayes’ are clearly less ‘direct and unswerving’ than the hymns of Watts and Wesley, they are nonetheless more immediately accessible, less subtly ambiguous, and less self-consciously eloquent than poems like ‘Dissentient Voice’ or ‘The Evangelist’.

The difference that Davie's religious convictions have made to his work can perhaps best be gauged by comparing two poems, one early and one late, addressed to a Christian woman. The first, entitled ‘Selina, Countess of Huntingdon’, appeared in Davie's first published book of poems, Brides of Reason. It describes an historical figure—Selina Hastings, who in the eighteenth century founded a group of Calvinist Methodists, opened a Methodist seminary that was later closed by court order, and spent a large part of her life trying to bring Methodism to the upper classes:

Your special witness, as I recollect,
Was, in your fervour, elegance; you yearned
For Grace, but only gracefully, and earned,
By sheer good taste, the title of ‘elect’.
So perfectly well-bred that in your hands
All pieties were lavender, that scent
Lingered about your college, where you spent
Your fragrance on the burly ordinands.
In your communion, virtue was uncouth;
But now that rigour lost its cutting edge,
As charm in you drove its schismatic wedge
Between your church's beauty and its truth.

This poem does not in any way assert religious faith; rather, it relies on the kind of historical and ironic distancing (‘All pieties were lavender’ and ‘you yearned / For Grace, but only gracefully’) found in several of Davie's early poems about religion to express an ambiguous attitude toward Dissent as a religious and cultural institution.

Far different is ‘An Anglican Lady: in memoriam Margaret Hine’, written recently:¹⁴

Flattered at having no
less an authority than
Richard Hooker named
for my correction, I
had drawn, before I knew it, the
notepaper towards me for
the reference (Book Five;
60, 3) when, live,
you sprang before me, Margaret.
                                                                                                    I had chanced,
brought perhaps by sortilege or some
diviner leading, on
a sheet of your, the secretary's,
notepaper. Oh my
poor Margaret, after how many
years, and since Hooker how
many centuries, does this
sad clod encounter, not in books but in
East Anglian blowing mornings, his
And Hooker's and your own, your decorous, God!

Although this poem uses allusion in a way that a Watts hymn would not, the reference to Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan theologian, is not essential—as the reference to Selina Hastings in ‘Selina, Countess of Huntingdon’ is—to an apprehension of the poem's meaning or feeling. ‘An Anglican Lady’ ends, after all, with a perfectly direct and forceful expression of religious conviction. Moreover, whereas the complex syntax of ‘Selina, Countess of Huntingdon’ tends to underscore the poem's ironic tone, and thus emphasize the distance between the narrator and what he is describing, in ‘An Anglican Lady’, the syntax works to strengthen the very unambiguous religious feeling that is at the heart of the poem (most noticeably in the delayed syntactical fulfilment that builds dramatic tension at the end of the poem, only to resolve it by coming to rest on the poem's most important word: God).

In ‘Bedfordshire’ (The Shires), Davie describes a nineteenth century brick chapel, and then adds, ‘I have never known / What to do with this that I am heir to’. The statement accurately describes Davie's lifelong ambiguity towards the particular, Dissenting doctrines that were his heritage. But it also describes the ambiguity towards religious belief in general that has marked the greater part of Davie's literary career. To say that in his recent turn toward religious faith, Davie has discovered ‘What to do with this that I am heir to’ is to risk overstatement. Nonetheless, Donald Davie's writing—both critical and poetic—has been affected markedly by the religious convictions that he has come to during the past decade, and it seems fair to predict that the work that he does in the next decade will be determined, at least as markedly, by those convictions.

Notes

1. The biographical information in this paragraph comes from a personal memorandum from Davie to me. ‘Winters and Leavis: Memories and Reflections’, Sewanee Review, 87, (Fall 1979) 4, pp. 608-18, includes several passing references to Davie's religious life. See also These the Companions, especially the final chapter, entitled ‘Puritans’.

2. ‘A West Riding Boyhood’, Prose 7 (1973); reprinted in Trying to Explain, p. 21. Parts of this essay are included in the first chapter of These the Companions.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations come from Donald Davie, Collected Poems 1950-1970. A passage in ‘A West Riding Boyhood’ bears comparison with the lines from ‘Barnsley and District’:

   The only material fear that I can remember is of ‘rough boys’, who were to be recognized in Barnsley about 1930 because they wore jerseys (and also, the roughest of them, wooden clogs), whereas gentle or gentlemanly or nice boys wore blouses, as I did. But this was not a serious fear, and did not survive a day when my worst tormentor turned out to wear a blouse and to be shod in sandals. Barnsley society, as it was known to a school-boy, was rigorously simplified and, as I see it now, truncated: there were only two classes—proletariat and petty bourgeois. Attorneys, clergymen, doctors (though not dentists) sent their children away to boarding-schools; and so, effectively, in St Mary's School there were only the sons of colliers and the sons of small shopkeepers like my father.

   (Trying to Explain, pp. 20-21)

4. Davie also makes an argument for the Augustan nature of Wesley's work in ‘The Classicism of Charles Wesley’, in Purity of Diction in English Verse, pp. 70-81. See also Davie's comments on Isaac Watts in his Introduction, Augustan Lyric, pp. 13-17.

5. Augustan Lyric, p. 53.

6. American Scholar (Autumn 1979) p. 470.

7. Sewanee Review, 88 (April-June 1980) 2, p. 177.

8. See These the Companions, chapters 3 and 4 for an account of Davie's experience in Russia.

9. Personal memorandum cited in footnote 1.

10. Introduction, The Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford University Press 1981), pp. xx-xxi. At the time of writing, ‘Livingshayes’ had not yet been published.

11. Davie has strong feelings about the conventional disregard, often for reasons of class, of Nonconformist contributions to English culture. In his Introduction to Augustan Lyric (p. 15), he says:

    Particularly puerile are attempts to explain English nonconformity, along with brass bands and whippet-racing, as a product of something called (if you please) ‘working-class culture’. One looks in vain for any general recognition that the artistic culture of the nation, so far from being repudiated by nonconformists as the product of a ruling class or an alien caste, has been embraced by the best of them in every generation, and enriched (though also at times valuably purged) by their efforts. Isaac Watts is the unavoidable representative of that embrace and that enrichment.

12. A Gathered Church, pp. 25-6.

13. Oxford Book of Christian Verse, pp. xxviii-xxix.

14. At the time of writing, ‘An Anglican Lady’ had not yet been published.