There’s something about the Welsh writer W.H. Davies (1871–1940) that draws a reader back to him, even while we admit that he wasn’t the greatest of poets, the greatest of thinkers, or the greatest of observers. To identify exactly what gave him his power of never quite slipping from mind — that’s a puzzle. He was a runaway apprentice, a tramp who train-hopped his was across America, a cripple, and a minor literary talent who won’t quite disappear.

In March, the Sun offered “The Inquest” as Poem of the Day, his tetrameter quatrains about serving on a coroner’s jury investigating the death of an infant. It is a poem of horror, told in a light voice of comedy, and the effect is terrifying. In today’s poem, “The Bust,” Davies reaches toward romance instead of horror. But “The Bust” has its own strange sense of mystery and the unknown. In quatrains built from tetrameter couplets, the speaker tells of a cleaning woman and the absence of dust on the lips of the bronze bust after his long absence.

The Bust
by W.H. Davies

When I went wandering far from home,
I left a woman in my room
To clean my hearth and floor, and dust
My shelves and pictures, books and bust.

When I came back a welcome glow
Burned in her eyes — her voice was low;
And every thing was in its place,
As clean and bright as her own face.

But when I looked more closely there,
The dust was on my dark, bronze hair;
The nose and eyebrows too were white —
And yet the lips were clean and bright.

The years have gone, and so has she,
But still the truth remains with me —
How that hard mouth was once kept clean
By living lips that kissed unseen.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.