W. H. Davies' speaker bemoans the lack of leisure in society as he explores the idea of time and leisure used simply to observe natural events as they unfold.
Davies’ poem “Leisure” consists of seven rimed couplets, which one might arguably label an innovative sonnet. The poem’s purpose is to claim that life moves too fast and to bemoan that humans are too “full of care” to “stand and stare”; there is little or no time simply to stop and enjoy things.
First Couplet
The first couplet begins with the question: “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?” The reader can imagine that the speaker has been ridiculed by someone, perhaps as a child by an adult, for “standing and staring” at something that fascinated him. Now, in this poem, he explores the idea of standing and staring, and he wants to know what life is about if standing and staring cannot be tolerated.
Second Couplet
The speaker then begins to enumerate the many things for which there is no time: “No time to stand beneath the boughs, / And stare as long as sheep and cows.” The speaker compares the human condition to that of “sheep and cows”; these animals can stand and stare as long as they wish.
But the speaker by merely mentioning this fact laments his own situation. As a human being living in a fast-paced society, he would be laughed at and degraded for wanting to concentrate on the simple natural world around him. He would be labeled a sluggard.
Third Couplet
The speaker claims that as human beings travel by a wooded area, there is “no time” to see that the squirrels are hiding their nuts in the grass.
Fourth Couplet
In the fourth couplet, the speaker mourns the lack of time for seeing, “in broad daylight, / Streams full of stars, like skies at night.”
Fifth Couplet/ Sixth Couplet
The fifth and sixth couplets focus on the abstract quality of “Beauty”: there is no time to watch Beauty dance; the abstract concept is being personified. There is no time to stop and stare as a beautiful woman dances, and no time to wait to see her smile, first with her eyes and then with her mouth.
Seventh Couplet
The final couplet makes something of a moral judgment that it is pretty pitiful if human beings cannot just stand and stare at natural and beautiful things, because they are bogged down with responsibilities and worries.
Commentary
The poem reveals an interesting contradiction. Even though the speaker includes himself as a member of the muddled crowd of humanity so bedeviled with woe and worry that they lack time to observe nature and beauty closely, at the same time he demonstrates that he has, in fact, taken the time do that very thing. He has obviously overcome the stigma attached to “standing and staring.” And now he wants to persuade his fellows that this “standing and staring” is a good thing.
