A man lists everything he lacks, announces that he would not swap places with a king, and then, in the last four lines, takes it all back. W. H. Davies's "The Muse" is a tiny poem built on that reversal, and its charm lies in how cheerfully it lets a boast collapse.
The first half is an inventory of absence: no ale, no wine, no ornaments, scant meat, no maid, no wife. The repeated "no" gives the opening a flat, counting rhythm, like someone turning out empty pockets. Yet there is a small sleight of hand. "I have no ale" is a plain fact, but "No wine I want" is a claim about desire. The speaker slides between being without and not wanting, which is what people do when they want poverty to sound like a choice. The only straight admission is "My meat is scant", where "meat" means food in general. Then comes the oath "on my life", followed by a colon and a stanza break. The syntax holds back its payoff, so we wait with the speaker to hear what could outweigh all this.
The answer is modest: a pipe, some smoke, and the Muse. The verb "woo" matters here. It belongs to courtship, and the line before has just told us "No maid is near, I have no wife", so the Muse steps into the empty place beside him. The pipe suggests a cheap, private pleasure. Smoke is thin and drifting, and the judgement is mine, but it seems a fitting companion for inspiration, which is just as hard to hold. Against this the poem sets the king, the emblem of having everything. "To be a king / I would not choose" is the most settled-sounding moment, with its steady rhythm and its final, firm word "choose".
Then the last stanza begins with "But", and the poem turns on itself. "I crave all, / When she does fail." The verb has changed from the mild "want" to the hungry "crave", and "all" sweeps up everything he had earlier waved away. What looked like contentment turns out to be on loan from the Muse. Her presence makes poverty feel like kingship, and her absence makes it feel like poverty again. The shopping list comes back in near-mirror order, "Wife, ornaments. / Meat, wine and ale", so that "ale", the first thing he lacked, is also the last word. The stop in the middle of the list makes it come in gasps rather than a smooth catalogue. It is as if he were walking back through his own denials.
The form suits this humble confession. There are four quatrains, with lines of about four syllables and two main beats, and the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme: want/scant, wife/life, Muse/choose, fail/ale. Some of these rhymes are only approximate, and "pipe" sits close to "wife" and "life" without quite matching them. The short lines have a chant-like, almost nursery-rhyme quality, and they feel as cramped as the life described. The vocabulary is nearly all single-syllable words, and the one exception is "ornaments", which appears in both the first and last stanzas. Notice, then, that the only decorative word in the poem is the thing the speaker lacks. The poem also wears no ornament of its own, which makes its plainness feel deliberate. The rhymes follow the speaker's fall too. "Muse" and "choose" sound lofty and free, while "fail" and "ale" drag us down to appetite and the body.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about inspiration. It praises poetry as a consolation, and it also admits that the consolation is unreliable. The speaker does not pretend to be a stoic. He lets us see the moment when the pose slips, and that humour makes him likeable. In a few dozen words, the poem shows that a person can be rich in one hour and hungry for everything in the next, depending on whether the Muse turns up.