Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Davies

Davies doesn’t defend drunkenness so much as he attacks a certain kind of moral tidiness. By framing teetotalism as a deficit of “sympathy and generosity,” he flips the usual hierarchy: abstinence, typically coded as discipline and virtue, becomes emotional stinginess. The line works because it’s not really about alcohol; it’s about who gets to claim humanity.

The phrasing is doing sly work. “Men that drink” isn’t “drunkards” or “alcoholics” but a broad, familiar category of ordinary social beings. Drinking here stands in for fellowship: the pub as a rough democracy where stories are traded, inhibitions loosen, and class boundaries blur at least temporarily. Against that, “teetotallers” reads like a label, a movement identity, a self-congratulating badge. Davies implies that the refusal isn’t neutral; it can be a performance of superiority that withdraws from communal messiness.

Context matters. Davies, a poet with a tramp’s biography and an ear for the dignity of the marginal, writes from a Britain where temperance wasn’t just personal health advice but a muscular social campaign entangled with respectability, religion, and class control. Calling teetotalers ungenerous is a counter-punch at reformers who often treated working-class leisure as a problem to be corrected.

There’s provocation, even unfairness, in the overgeneralization, and that’s the point: it’s a moral dare. Davies is insisting that virtue without conviviality can curdle into judgment, and that sometimes the so-called vice is where grace and fellow-feeling actually get practiced.