From its opening command, “Christmas has come, let’s eat and drink,” W. H. Davies’s lyric treats the feast not as a pause for reflection but as a release from reflection. The central idea is that Christmas briefly dissolves the distinctions and resentments that structure ordinary life: study, money, rank, clothing, old quarrels. It is a festival of deliberate forgetting, where what one has is shared, what one wears no longer defines identity, and even the dead are told to stop stirring grievance.
The poem’s architecture supports this feeling of unstoppable festivity. It runs in rhyming couplets — care/share, rich/which, pen/men — with a strongly end-stopped, four-beat movement. Each couplet lands like a toast or a decision already made; there is little room for hesitation. The opening and closing couplet, “Farewell to study, books and pen, / And welcome to all kinds of men,” acts as a frame, turning the poem into an invitation or a door thrown open. The meter is mostly iambic tetrameter, but it dips into anapestic energy, as in “Christmas has come, let’s eat and drink,” making the verse sound like a carol or drinking song. This is not a poem that thinks about celebration; it performs celebration.
Davies’s imagery moves from the general to the bodily. Early lines deal in economic leveling: “Then ’tis the same, no matter which / Of us is poor, or which is rich,” and “There’s nothing now too rich or good / For poor men, not the King’s own food.” The mention of the King’s food is sharp; at Christmas the best food is taken from the symbolic table of power and placed before the poor. But the poem refuses to stay in abstract charity. It welcomes the poor beggar in vividly unpretty detail: “I’ll not see / That hand of yours dislodge a flea,— / While you sit at my side and beg, / Or right foot scratching your left leg.” Here the beggar is not a sentimental figure to be cleaned up; he is accepted with his itching body, his embarrassing gestures. That acceptance is the poem’s idea of welcome.
The most striking image comes when clothing and identity are stripped away: “We’ll not let cloth divide our souls, / They’ll swim stark naked in the bowls.” In the drinking bowls, souls become naked swimmers; drink dissolves social costume. The phrase “stark naked” is deliberately shocking after the polite talk of cloth and souls, and it suggests both vulnerability and equality. The soul, not the suit, is what meets in the shared drink. Later the speaker insists that “No matter what lies in the bowls, / We’ll make it rich with our own souls,” so the drink becomes a place where inner selves mingle, not just a means of intoxication.
There is also a darker edge to the merriment. The poem tells foes to forget “The mischief-making dead that fret / The living with complaint like this— / ‘He wronged us once, hate him and his.’” Those dead voices are imagined as poisonous ancestors, turning past wrongs into present hatred. Christmas, in Davies’s version, is partly a rebellion against the dead: a time to refuse inherited grudges. That gives the feasting a moral urgency. It is not mere indulgence, though the poem cheerfully admits excess: “We will not now / Measure the ale our brains allow,” and “We’ll count no change when we spend gold.” The rejection of restraint is also a rejection of self-protection. To give for nothing, not to lend, is to abandon the economy of debt that governs ordinary life.
What makes the poem significant is its carnival spirit. It uses a rollicking, almost childlike rhythm to carry a serious social vision: for one day, the hierarchies of wealth, clothing, bodily shame, and old grievance can be laughed and drunk away. It does not pretend that these divisions disappear permanently; but by framing the poem as a series of welcomes and farewells, Davies makes Christmas a ritual doorway. The final repetition of “Farewell to study, books and pen, / And welcome to all kinds of men” reminds us that the feast is temporary, yet for its duration it creates a different world.