The Nonconformist

By Donald Davie 1922–1995 Donald Davie

X, whom society’s most mild command,

For instance evening dress, infuriates,

In art is seen confusingly to stand

For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.

Taxed to explain what this resentment is

He feels for small proprieties, it comes,

He likes to think, from old enormities

And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms.

Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes

His fathers suffered rankle in his blood,

That he find least excusable the times

When they acceded, not when they withstood.

How else explain this bloody-minded bent

To kick against the prickings of the norm;

When to conform is easy, to dissent;

And when it is most difficult, conform?

Source: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd, 1985)

Biography

Donald Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to George Clarke and Alice Sugden Davie, received his early education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and spent his boyhood in “the industrially ravaged landscape,” as he called it, of the West Riding. As a Northerner, he has said that in literature he grew to like “the spare and lean.” From his mother, who had a liking for poetry and knew, according to Davie, “the greater part, . . .

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