‘What is this life if, full of care...’
This statue celebrates W.H. Davies’ poem, Leisure.
Davies was born at 6 Portland Street, Newport in 1871. For years he was a rootless drifter in North America until, jumping a train in Canada, his foot was crushed.
With a wooden leg and the sense that, ‘All the wildness had been taken out of me,’ Davies returned to England to write. Sleeping in poorhouses, he wrote secretly, pretending to snooze while dreaming up his verse.