Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Davies

Davies turns a birth certificate into weather. “It was the rainbow gave thee birth” isn’t just a pretty origin story; it’s a deliberate refusal of the blunt, biological account of where beauty comes from. In a single line he makes creation feel accidental, brief, and miraculous - a phenomenon that appears only when conditions align, then vanishes. That’s the subtext doing heavy work: loveliness isn’t earned or explained, it’s witnessed.

The rainbow also carries a quiet double edge. It “left thee all her lovely hues,” implying both inheritance and abandonment. The speaker praises the beloved as a walking aftermath, a living residue of something already gone. That tension - gift and loss in the same breath - is classic lyric pressure. It flatters, but it also suggests impermanence: if your colors come from an evanescent arc of light, you’re as contingent as the sky that made you.

Context matters with Davies. He’s a poet of plainspoken wonder, suspicious of modern bustle and attentive to transient pleasures (a man who famously begged readers to make time “to stand and stare”). This line fits that ethic: it elevates the small spectacle of nature into a moral argument for attention. The rainbow becomes a shortcut past social status, pedigree, and explanation. Beauty, Davies implies, doesn’t need credentials; it needs eyes.