In W. H. Davies’s “Smiles,” two faces, one dark and one fair, are transformed by the same fleeting gesture. The speaker remembers “a black girl once, / As black as winter’s night,” whose parted lips release “a flood of light”; he then observes “a maiden now, / Fair as a summer’s day,” whose smile makes the broad daylight in summer time “look black.” The central idea is not that one girl outshines the other, but that a smile is a sudden, cosmic illumination — a “milky way” — so brilliant that it overpowers ordinary light and leaves a kind of night behind when it closes.
The poem’s structure is rigorously balanced. Each eight-line stanza follows the same movement: a figure is named, her face is compared to a natural light condition, her lips part, the milky way appears, the lips close, and night returns. The first stanza stays in the past tense (“I saw,” “There came,” “night came back”), while the second moves into the present (“I see,” “It makes,” “night comes back”), so the insight feels both remembered and immediately witnessed. This symmetry is reinforced by rhythm and rhyme. The lines are mostly short, three-beat units that move quickly, as if the poem itself is smiling and closing. In the first stanza, “night” chimes with “light” and “black” with “back”; in the second, “day” chimes with “way” and “black” with “back” again. That repeated return to “back” matters: each smile ends in a going back to darkness, making the poem a small cycle of opening and closing.
Davies’s imagery is deliberately cosmic. “Winter’s night” is not used to diminish the black girl; instead it turns her face into a dark sky across which light can travel. The phrase “flood of light” suggests something liquid and unstoppable, and then “milky way” lifts the image from water to galaxy. A smile, in these lines, is not just teeth or lips; it is the whole band of stars thrown across a face. In the second stanza the same image is more startling because the background is already bright. The maiden is “fair as a summer’s day,” yet her smile “makes the broad daylight / In summer time look black.” Here “black” changes meaning. It no longer describes skin; it describes ordinary sunlight made dull by comparison with the smile’s brilliance. The poem quietly overturns the convention that fairness equals light and blackness equals lack. Both faces can hold the milky way, and both faces lose it when the lips close.
The final line, “And night comes back,” is the emotional hinge. In the first stanza it reads almost literally: the black girl’s face, described as night, returns to darkness. In the second stanza it is figurative: even in summer, with the fair maiden still present, the closing of her lips brings a felt darkness. The smile, not complexion, controls light and dark. Davies keeps the tone plain and songlike, but the paradox is large: the brightest thing in either scene is temporary, and its withdrawal is a kind of night no season can prevent.
What makes “Smiles” significant is this economy. In two tiny stanzas it turns a universal, easily sentimentalized moment into a controlled study of light. It avoids praising one kind of beauty over another by making the smile itself the source of radiance. The repeated structure suggests that beauty lies less in the face we see than in what the face does. A closed face, whether “as black as winter’s night” or “fair as a summer’s day,” ends in the same darkness. Parted lips, for a moment, bring the sky down to a face, and the closing line records what it costs to lose that.