I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers’, or through some chance meeting at Johnson’s [Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)]. I was indolent and procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. […] I began to hear now in some detail of the restaurant-keeper’s daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and of the weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of Dowson’s emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was said, but, drunk, desired whatever woman chance brought, clean or dirty.
W. B. YEATS: Autobiographies (1955)
Born at Belmont Hill in Kent, Dowson came from a wealthy, respectable family who owned a small dock in Limehouse. His father suffered from severe tuberculosis and died of an overdose of chloral hydrate; his mother, also a consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895. On his father’s death, he inherited a fortune which, like Baudelaire, he squandered. Having left Oxford without a degree, he entered the London society that gathered round Beardsley and Wilde. He contributed poems to the Yellow Book and The Savoy, frequented the Café Royal, the drawing rooms of the social and literary glitterati, and indulged his need for alcohol in the taverns of the capital. He joined the Rhymers’ Club, a group of poets that met in the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street to read poetry. Its members included Yeats, Ernest Rhys and Arthur Symonds, and they published two collections of verse in 1892 and 1894. Yeats reminisces about the Rhymers’ Club in his Autobiographies, and describes Dowson as ‘gentle, affectionate, drifting’. His father, because of delicate health, had spent much of his time in the South of France, and his love of the country rubbed off on his son. Dowson’s publisher gave him an allowance to live in France and provide translations of French poetry (his versions of Verlaine’s ‘Il pleure dans mon cœur’, ‘Colloque sentimental’, ‘Spleen’ and ‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit’ are particularly fine). It was during his wanderings in France that he met Guy de Maupassant and read Baudelaire. Towards the end of his life he spent an increasing amount of time in Paris and Brittany, before returning to England, where he died of tuberculosis, aged thirty-two.
His poetry is characterized by a world-weariness, exacerbated by his unrequited love for Adelaide Foltinowicz and the suicide in 1895 of his parents. Adelaide, the daughter of a Soho restaurant owner, was only eleven when Dowson met her; he courted her for two years and made her a proposal of marriage, but she rejected him, and married a waiter when she was nineteen. Dowson published two volumes of poetry, Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899), and two novels, A Comedy of Masks (1893) and Adrian Rome (1899), written in collaboration with Arthur Moore. His one-act verse play The Pierrot of the Minute was published in 1897, and Dilemmas, a collection of stories, appeared in 1895. His poetry, which shows great variety in rhythm and stanza form, was admired by Yeats, Wilde and Stefan George, and George published translations of three of Dowson’s poems (including ‘Serafita’) in a volume that also contained German versions of Rossetti, Swinburne, Jacobsen and Verhaeren. Margaret Mitchell greatly admired his ‘Cynara’, and from the opening line of its third stanza chose the phrase ‘gone with the wind’ as the title of her famous novel, because it suggested the ‘far away, faintly sad sound I wanted’. A biography of Dowson by Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, was published in 2000.
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
A song of the setting sun!
The sky in the west is red,
And the day is all but done:
While yonder up overhead,
All too soon,
There rises, so cold, the cynic moon.
A song of a winter day!
The wind of the north doth blow,
From a sky that’s chill and gray,
On fields where no crops now grow,
Fields long shorn
Of bearded barley and golden corn.
[A song of an old, old man!
His hairs are white and his gaze,
Long bleared in his visage wan,
With its weight of yesterdays,
Joylessly
He stands and mumbles and looks at me.]
’Twas plucked in the tender bud,
And fair and fresh for an hour,
In a lady’s hair it stood.
Now, ah, now,
Faded it lies in the dust and low.
Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus Amore1
PROPERTIUS
Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,
Here in the silence, under the wan moon;
Sweet are thine eyes, but how can I be glad,
Knowing they change so soon?
[For Love’s sake, Dear, be silent! Cover me
In the deep darkness of thy falling hair:
Fear is upon me and the memory
Of what is all men’s share.]
O could this moment be perpetuate!
Must we grow old, and leaden-eyed and gray,
And taste no more the wild and passionate
Love sorrows of to-day?
[Grown old, and faded, Sweet! and past desire,
Let memory die, lest there be too much ruth,
Remembering the old, extinguished fire
Of our divine, lost youth.]
O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth!
My lips’ life-fruitage, might I taste and die
Here in thy garden, where the scented south
Wind chastens agony;
Reap death from thy live lips in one long kiss,
And look my last into thine eyes and rest:
What sweets had life to me sweeter than this
Swift dying on thy breast?
Or, if that may not be, for Love’s sake, Dear!
Keep silence still, and dream that we shall lie,
Red mouth to mouth, entwined, and always hear
The south wind’s melody,
Here in thy garden, through the singing boughs,
Beyond the reach of time and chance and change,
And bitter life and death, and broken vows,
That sadden and estrange.
Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these!
Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time’s deceit.
Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.
[Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.]
(C. Scott)
Exceeding sorrow
Consumeth my sad heart!
Because to-morrow
We must depart,
Now is exceeding sorrow
All my part!
Give over playing,
Cast thy viol away:
Merely laying
Thine head my way:
Prithee, give over playing,
Grave or gay.
Be no word spoken;
Weep nothing: let a pale
Silence, unbroken
Silence prevail!
Prithee, be no word spoken,
Lest I fail!
Forget to-morrow!
Weep nothing: only lay
In silent sorrow
Thine head my way:
Let us forget to-morrow,
This one day!
By the sad waters of separation
Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
Of the old memorial days.
In music I have no consolation,
No roses are pale enough for me;
The sound of the waters of separation
Surpasseth roses and melody.
By the sad waters of separation
Dimly I hear from an hidden place
The sigh of mine ancient adoration:
Hardly can I remember your face.
If you be dead, no proclamation
Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:
Living, the waters of separation
Sever for ever your soul from me.
No man knoweth our desolation;
Memory pales of the old delight;
While the sad waters of separation
Bear us on to the ultimate night.
See how the trees and the osiers lithe
Are green bedecked and the woods are blithe,
The meadows have donned their cape of flowers,
The air is soft with the sweet May showers,
And the birds make melody:
But the spring of the soul, the spring of the soul,
Cometh no more for you or for me.
Murmureth through the almond trees;
The jonquil flaunteth a gay, blonde head,
The primrose peeps from a mossy bed,
And the violets scent the lane.
But the flowers of the soul, the flowers of the soul,
For you and for me bloom never again.
I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,
And all my memories were put to sleep.
I watched the river grow more white and strange,
All day till evening I watched it change.
All day till evening I watched the rain
Beat wearily upon the window pane.
I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything that ever I desired.
Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me
The shadow of a shadow utterly.
All day mine hunger for her heart became
Oblivion, until the evening came,
And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,
With all my memories that could not sleep.
(Ireland)
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
(Quilter, C. Scott)
With His songs and Her days
To His Lady and to Love
Violets and leaves of vine,
Into a frail, fair wreath
We gather and entwine:
A wreath for Love to wear,
Fragrant as his own breath,
To crown his brow divine
All day till night is near,
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.
Violets and leaves of vine
For Love that lives a day,
We gather and entwine.
All day till Love is dead,
Till eve falls, cold and gray,
These blossoms, yours and mine,
Love wears upon his head.
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.
Violets and leaves of vine
For Love when poor Love dies
We gather and entwine.
This wreath that lives a day
Over his pale, cold eyes,
Kissed shut by Proserpine,
At set of sun we lay:
Violets and leaves of vine
We gather and entwine.
See above, under Delius.
What land of Silence,
Where pale stars shine
On apple-blossom
And dew-drenched vine,
Is yours and mine?
The silent valley
That we will find,
Where all the voices
Of humankind
Are left behind.
The world forsaken,
And out of mind
Honour and labour,
We shall not find
The stars unkind.
And men shall travail,
And laugh and weep;
But we have vistas
Of gods asleep,
With dreams as deep.
A land of silence,
Where pale stars shine
On apple-blossoms
And dew-drenched vine,
Be yours and mine!
See above, under Delius.
Come not before me now, O visionary face!
Me tempest-tost, and borne along life’s passionate sea;
Troublous and dark and stormy though my passage be;
Not here and now may we commingle or embrace,
Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface
The bright illumination of thy memory,
Which dominates the night; rest, far away from me,
In the serenity of thine abiding-place!
But when the storm is highest, and the thunders blare,
And sea and sky are riven, O moon of all my night!
Stood down but once in pity of my great despair,
And let thine hand, though over late to help, alight
But once upon my pale eyes and my drowning hair,
Before the great waves conquer in the last vain fight.