Ernest Dowson

Ernest Christopher Dowson (2 August 1867 - 23 February 1900) was an English poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, who was associated with the Decadent movement.

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), from The Poems of Ernest Dowson, 1905. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Life

Dowson was born at The Grove, Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent, on August 2nd, 1867. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, Browning's "Waring," for a time Prime Minister of New Zealand, and author of "Ranolf and Amohia," and other poems.

His father, who had himself a taste for literature, lived a good deal in France and on the Riviera, on account of the delicacy of his health, and Ernest had a somewhat irregular education, chiefly out of England, before he entered Queen's College, Oxford.

He left in 1887 without taking a degree, and came to London, where he lived for several years, often revisiting France, which was always his favorite country.

He was a member of the Rhymers' Club, which included W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson. He was also a frequent contributor to the literary magazines The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Dowson collaborated on 2 unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole, and wrote reviews for The Critic.

Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy.

Never robust, and always reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached friends whom he had in London.

As his disease weakened him more and more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a doctor, let himself half starve, and was found 1 day in a Bodega with only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to walk, by a friend (Robert Sherard), himself in some difficulties, who immediately took him back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy outskirt of Catford, where he was himself living, and there generously looked after him for the last 6 weeks of his life.

He did not realize that he was going to die; and was full of projects for the future, when the £600 which was to come to him from the sale of some property should have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to read Dickens, whom he had never read before, with singular zest; and, on the last day of his life, sat up talking eagerly till 5 in the morning. At the very moment of his death he did not know that he was dying. He tried to cough, could not cough, and the heart quietly stopped. He died at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Catford, S.E., on Friday morning, and was buried in the Roman Catholic part of the Lewisham Cemetery on February 27.

Writing

His prose works include the short stories collected as Dilemmas (1895), and the two novels A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome (each co-written with Arthur Moore). Some of his short prose was first published in the journal The Yellow Book.

Critical introduction

by Aldous Huxley

History affords us only too many examples of the poets whom life and its diurnal miseries have overwhelmed. Out of this pitiful company, some, like Chatterton and de Nerval, found in suicide their only road of escape. Others needed not to go “ridiculement se pendre au réverbère”: to these, in its own time, came early death, putting a period to all their wretchedness. Ernest Dowson is numbered among these. For him reality meant poverty and disease. Conquered by life, he was yet in a sense its conqueror; for out of his life’s ugliness and pain he created beauty. The cry that his agony extorted from him was an articulate music, always melancholy and pathetic, and possessing sometimes a plaintive loveliness all its own.

His poetry is always essentially lyrical and personal. He generalized no world-philosophy out of his experiences. Because life wearied him he did not, like Byron or Leopardi, postulate a universal ennui, did not rise in titanic curses against the Creator of a world where life was only supportable by illusions. Dowson did not see in his own misfortunes the Promethean symbol of persecuted but indomitable humanity. His poetry is the poetry of resignation, not of rebellion. He suffers, and records the fact. That is enough; he draws no universal conclusions, he does not rail on fate; he is content to suffer and be sad.

Weariness and resignation — these are his themes; weariness of life and a great desire for the “quiet consummation” of death, the annihilator; resignation, helpless and hopeless, to the fate that persecutes him. This constitutes his stock of poetical material. He sings the same song over and over, a thin, lamenting melody.

With no great desire to achieve originality, he made unashamed use of all the time-honoured poetical paraphernalia — lute and viol, poppy and rose and lily, with all those rare, remote precious things which the poets throughout the ages have appropriated to their peculiar use. He did not trouble himself to seek out a new diction, to invent new moulds of expression in which to cast his thought. The old conventional language of poetry, a language consciously archaic and aloof from the living speech of men, satisfied him completely. In his language he never passes the traditional bounds of 19th-century Elizabethanism.

What is it, then, which makes Dowson a poet? We have seen how limited was his stock of ideas, how familiar his images and diction. What is the quality in his work which raises it above flat mediocrity and makes it readable? Wherein does his magic consist? The answer to these questions is surely to be found in that quality of musical beauty which is characteristic of all his work.

Each poet has his musical beauty, each period is distinguished by its own harmony. To wed the musical form with the content of meaning so that the music expresses the thought in the purely sensuous symbols of its harmony—that is the achievement of the true poet. A great poet can tune his music to every mode.

Dowson, with his very limited poetical genius, knew of a single kind of music, the music of sadness. The rhythm of his lines is always slow and passionless. No harshness of abrupt energy breaks their melancholy sweetness, no eagerness quickens the weariness of their march. To heighten the effect of his music he makes frequent use of the refrain. Every reader of poetry knows how absurd or how deeply impressive this serial return to the same point may be. Dowson’s use of the device is for the most part happy: "I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion." "Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things" are haunting lines, whose return, stanza by stanza, produces a cumulative effect upon the mind, like the insistent moan of Dunbar’s “Timor Mortis conturbat me.” Musical arrangements more elaborate than the simple periodical refrain are often used in Dowson’s works.

He has written several villanelles. Well handled, the form is capable of being of great beauty. "A little, passionately, not at all!" — he evokes here a drooping, evanescent music, a "dying fall" of poetry. Indeed, all Dowson’s poetry possesses this quality of a music wearily drooping towards its close, trembling on the verge of silence. He reproduces the negative emotions of spent passion, the feelings of quiet sadness evoked by a song that draws to an end—a great period of human activity that closes. It is not for us to complain that he did not achieve more, as much as the great poets. Rather, we must be thankful for the contribution of beauty which he has brought to the general treasury — however small that contribution may be.

Recognition

In anticipation of the anniversary of Dowson's birth on August 2, 2010, his grave, which had fallen derelict and been victimized by vandalism, was restored. The unveiling and memorial service were publicised in the local (South London Press) and national (BBC Radio 4 and the Times Literary Supplement) British media, and dozens paid posthumous tribute to the poet 110 years after his death.

Dowson is best remembered for some vivid phrases, such as "days of wine and roses]]" from his poem Vitae Summa Brevis, which appears in stanza 2:

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.

and "gone with the wind", from Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae, the 3rd stanza of which reads:

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.

In her words, it was the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of that stanza's opening line that inspired Margaret Mitchell]] to call her only novel Gone with the Wind.

The refrain (repeated at the end of all 4 stanzas) was the inspiration for the song title "Always True to You in My Fashion" from Kiss Me, Kate by Cole Porter, which in turn inspired a similar line in "Fashion Victim" by Carole Pope and Kevan Staples of Rough Trade.

Publications

Poetry

• Verses. London: L. Smithers, 1896.
• Decorations in Verse and Prose. London: L. Smithers, 1899.
• The Poems of Ernest Dowson (with memoir by Arthur Symons; illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley). London & New York: John Lane, 1905.
• Poems in Verse and Prose. Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1905.
• Cynara: A little book of verse. Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1907.
• The Complete Poems (edited by Elinore Blaisdell). New York: Medusa Head, 1928.
• The Complete Lyrics. Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1938.
• The Poems of Ernest Dowson. London: Unicorn Press, 1946.
• The Poems of Ernest Dowson (edited by John Mark Longaker). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962 [1963].
• The Poetical Works (edited by Desmond Flower). London: Cassell, 1967.
• The Poetry of Ernest Dowson (edited by Desmond Flower). Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970.
• Three Poets of the Rhymers' Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (edited by Derek Stanford). Cheadle, UK: Carcanet Press, 1974.
• Verses with Decorations. Oxford, UK & New York: Woodstock Books, 1994.
• Collected Poems (edited by R.K.R. Thornton & Caroline Dowson). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press, 2003.
• Some Poems by Ernest Dowson (edited by Robert Nye). Warwick, UK: Greville Press, 2006.

Plays

• The Pierrot of the Minute: A dramatic phantasy in one act. Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1913; New York: Samuel French, 1915; New York: Grolier, 1923.

Novels

• A Comedy of Masks: A novel (with Arthur Moore). (3 volumes), Heinemann, 1893. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III.
  • New York: Garland, 1977.
• Adrian Rome (with Arthur Moore). London: Methuen, 1899.
• The Dying of Francis Dunne: A study. Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1974.

Short Fiction

• Dilemmas: Stories and studies in sentiment. London: Elkin Mathews, 1895; New York: L.J. Gomme, 1914; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press,
• Studies in Sentiment. Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1915.
• The Stories of Ernest Dowson (edited by John Mark Longaker). London: Allen, 1946; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947.
• Collected Shorter Fiction (edited by Monica Borg & R.K.R. Thornton). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press, 2003.

Translated

• The Story of Beauty and the Beast: The complete fairy story translated from the French. London: John Lane, 1908.
• Honore de Balzac, A Passion in the Desert.
• Honore de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes. New York: Illustrated Editions, 1931.

Collected editions

• The Poems of Ernest Dowson: Verses / The pierrot of the minute / Decorations in verse and prose. Portland, ME: T.B. Mosher, 1902.
• The Poems and Prose (with memoir by Arthur Symons). New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919.
• Selected Poems and Prose. New Formalist Press, 2002.

Letters

• Ernest Dowson 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (edited by Victor Plarr, with a bibliography compiled by H. Guy Harrison). London: Elkin Mathews, 1914; New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1914.
• Letters (edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas). London: Cassell, 1967 [1968].
• New Letters (edited by Desmond Flower). Andoversford, Gloucestershire, UK: Whittington Press, 1984.

Richard Burton reads Ernest Dowson's poem 'Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae'

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

"Days of Wine and Roses" by Ernest Dowson (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

• List of British poets

References

• Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The life of Ernest Dowson, poet and decadent. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
• Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson: A biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
• Henry Maas, Ernest Dowson: Poetry and love in the 1890s. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2009.
• Thomas Burnett Swann. Ernest Dowson. New York: Twayne, 1964.
• Arthur Symons, Memoirs (edited by Karl Beckson). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

External links

Poems

• Dowson in Modern British Poetry: "To One in Bedlam," "You Would Have Understood Me"
• 3 poems by Dowson: "Autumnal," "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae," "Envoy" (to Verses)
• Selected poetry of Ernest Dowson 3 poems (A Last Word, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae, Vit{ae} Summa Brevis Spem nos Vetet Incohare Longam) at Representative Poetry Online..
• Dowson in The English Poets: An anthology: "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration," "Non sum qualis eram bonæ sub regno Cynaræ," "Vain Hope," "Villanelle of Marguerites," "A Last Word"
• Ernest Dowson at Poetry Nook (75 poems)
• Ernest Christopher Dowson at PoemHunter (81 poems)

Audio / video

• Ernest Dowson poems at YouTube

Books

• Poems (1900)
• Works by Ernest Dowson at Project Gutenberg
• Ernest Dowson at Amazon.com

About

• Ernest Dowson in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Ernest Dowson at NNDB
• memoir of Dowson by Arthur Symons