Poetry panels - Cathcart Street

On 18 December 1909 a badly decomposed body was found floating in the sea off Mousehole, Cornwall.  Brought to shore, it was identified as being the remains of poet John Davidson.  He had disappeared from his home in Penzance in March of 1909. 

John Davidson was born in Barrhead in 1857 and his family moved to Greenock when he was just five years old.  His father, Alexander Davidson was a minister in Nelson Street Evangelical Union Church.  John was educated at Highlanders Academy and became a pupil-teacher there.  He worked for a while in the laboratory at Walker’s sugar refinery.  Later he moved to London.

Sculpture of Ginger the Horse, Cathcart Street, Greenock.

John Davidson was a poet and a writer.  The poetic lines on the panels come from his work A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet written in 1894.  The poem deals mainly with a son’s attitude towards the religious beliefs and expectations of his parents.  These lines from the poem, referencing the River Clyde, can be found etched on panels at the piazza at the east end of Cathcart Street in Greenock, behind the sculpture of Ginger the Horse.

His father’s house looked out across a firth

Broad-bosomed like a mere, beside a town

Far in the North where Time could take his ease,

And Change hold holiday; where Old and new

Weltered upon the border of the world. 

Now may my life beat out upon this shore

A prouder music than the winds and waves

Can compass in their haughtiest moods.  I need

No world more spacious than the region here:

The foam-embroidered firth, a purple path.

...

This old grey town, this firth, the further strand

Spangled with hamlets, and the wooded steeps,

Whose rocky tops begind each other press,

Fantastically carved like antique helms

High-hung in heaven’s cloudy armoury,

Is world enough for me.  

For this was in the North, where Time stands still

And Change holds holiday, where Old and New

Welter upon the border of the world,

And savage faith works woe.

You can read the whole poem here.  There are other lines (not on panels) which I’m sure will strike a chord with any one who remembers the Greenock that was –

... this grey town

That pipes the morning up before the lark

With shrieking steam, and from a hundred stalks

Lacquers the sooty sky; where hammers clang

On iron hulls, and cranes in harbours creak

Rattle and swing, whole cargoes on their necks;

Where men sweat gold that others hoard or spend,

And lurk like vermin in their narrow streets: 

The last words rest with Davidson who wrote in a letter to a friend -

“Of all poets, I envy Homer, of whom nothing is known.  The lives of men of letters should never be written; only the lives of Caesar and Napoleon are worth writing.”