The Poems of Ernest Dowson

by Ernest Dowson, Mark Longaker (Editor)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1902

About the author

Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist and writer of short stories, associated with the Decadent movement.

Dowson attended The Queen's College, Oxford, but left before obtaining a degree. In November 1888, he started work with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, east London, established by the poet's grandfather. He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls, and taking the performers to dinner. Meanwhile, he was also working assiduously at his writing. 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 two unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole, and wrote reviews for The Critic.

Dowson was also a prolific translator of French fiction, including novels by Balzac and the Goncourt brothers, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.

In 1889, at the age of 23, Dowson fell in love with 11-year-old Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurant owner. Adelaide is reputed to be the subject of one his best-known poems, Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae. He pursued her unsuccessfully; in 1897, she married a tailor who lodged above her father's restaurant and Dowson was crushed. In August, 1894, Dowson's father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February, 1895, and soon Dowson began to decline rapidly.

Robert Sherard one day found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford where he was himself living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard's cottage and died there of alcoholism at the age of 32. He is buried in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries.

Reviews

[Martin]

At last, a poet who no longer hears the music, yet insists he must continue singing—a fellow most famous for his phrases rather than his verses, such a shame, and for his drink rather than his dithyramb—a pity, and his turn-of-phrases that can’t quite get to the essence of the turn of the century. I adore Ernest Dowson, and I consider him a phenomenal talent whose prosody—while kind of trite—is nevertheless given grandiosity by the beyond-language beauty of his imagery. He exceeded the l'art pour l'art nonsense of his time. His ability to invoke the crooked image in clarion consonance is unique. Never has English sounded so Romantic, specifically French. (Making English sound like French is not worthwhile itself, but how it serves these verses!) Yes, here is a poet who gives vivacity to the sad art nouveau paintings and posters of his time. Here is a poet who wants nothing more than to be a poet: nothing vatic, nothing prophetic, nothing resembling Shelley nor the horrors of Eliot that were on the horizon. Dowson merely wanted to be a maker or melody, finding dithyrambic phrases to make English sound lonely and indifferent. The pronoun "I" now demands pity or contempt, for it now represents a poet more concerned with the sound of words than the purpose of words. It is, if we stop and think about it, a pretty radical notion; yes, it was common among these aesthetes—but no one...*no one*...comes nearer than Dowson to poetry.

Ezra Pound divided poetry into three different realms: logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia. Our modern verse often champions the first. Dowson considers the second and third to be the very heart of his art. If it sounds dulcet, then it is a poem. If the imagery intoxicates, then it is Dionysian. No, I don’t think this fellow is on par with, say, Keats. Who could be? But my goodness is Dowson excellent, and it’s a pity that he was swept into the fold of the aesthetes, because he could have done something that transcended any of his peers had he retained a modicum of independence.

[John Allen]

Poet Ernest Dowson has the gentle, uncanny distance of the true decadent poet. All his poetry reflect a strained sensibility which transcends itself in poems ornate and absolutely realized. His unwavering religiosity is an unalterable part of his work, like a bucolic cloud or ecstatic crown. The ending of this poem, “Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone”, is a line of metaphorical greatness.


“Epigram”

Because I am idolatrous and have besought,
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,
The admirable image that my dreams have wrought
Out of her swan’s neck and her dark, abundant hair:
The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their own,
Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone.

My edition is has pale, ivy leaves and is encased in a green library slip cover the library’s index number on the back.

[Drkshadow03]

Decadent poet who writes mostly love poems tinged with a touch of world weariness alongside a few devotional religious poems. A fair number of poems in the villanelle form (a difficult form to work in) and seems fond of rhyme and using repeating lines between stanzas in many of his non-Villanelle poems as well. The vast majority of the poems were fine, but not particularly remarkable. I probably enjoyed the one-act play Pierrot of the Minute about longing and love the best of all the works.

[Allen Rosdahl]

I read the version of his collected works which was compiled and edited by his friend and fellow poet Arthur Symons. Symons may have judged his friend harshly in the introduction but I think the representation of his work betrayed his true sentiment toward his friend. Ernest Dowson did not live long as is customary with the decadents, which may have been a source of bitterness between himself and Symons. His earlier poems are quite hit-and-miss, the rhyme schemes are often overly ambitious. I also didn’t care for the use of Latin for many of the titles. For reference here is short one I did like quite a bit,

“EXILE
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.”

My favorite part of this collection was Pierrot of the Minute, and the Decorations which feature after it. I do not know if these were arranged chronologically but it would certainly make sense if they were because the later part is outstanding. The later works are more cynical or indifferent, but also more liberated as it were, and to my taste, superior. Dowson is certainly a good poet worthy of more recognition than he receives, contrary to whatever his jaded friend might have said. The lithograph illustrations by Beardsley also add a nice flair to it. I would recommend this to anyone interested in poetry and prose from the naughty nineties.

[James Henderson]

April Love

We have walked in Love's land a little way,
We have learnt his lesson a little while,
And shall we not part at the end of day,
With a sigh, a smile?
A little while in the shine of the sun,
We were twined together, joined lips, forgot
How the shadows fall when the day is done,
And when Love is not.
We have made no vows--there will none be broke,
Our love was free as the wind on the hill,
There was no word said we need wish unspoke,
We have wrought no ill.
So shall we not part at the end of day,
Who have loved and lingered a little while,
Join lips for the last time, go our way,
With a sigh, a smile?


Ernest Dowson lived in London, worked at his parents’ dry-docking business, and was a member of the Rhymers’ Club with W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons. Dowson’s poems trace the sorrow of unrequited love and are the source of the phrases “gone with the wind” and “days of wine and roses.” He also supplied the earliest written mention in English of soccer. Both of Dowson’s parents committed suicide, and Dowson, who rarely had a fixed home, died at the age of 32.

[Victor]

Possibly the best rhyming lyric portey in English I've ever read. The knowing cynicism mixed with dearest hope that marks the content expressed in the antiquated diction of Victorian poesy combined with Dowson's flair for tight quips and bon mots throughout pushes the lyrics far above average. The verse drama, while as painful as most rhyming closet drama, also manages what is arguably the earliest real Modernist conception of the character of Pierrot, an important touchstone for early high Modernists like Pound, and my edition has some gorgeous plates by Beardsley to boot. Overall amazing.

[Geoffrey O'Connor]

I liked hsi Horace quote "Vitae Summa brevis spem nos vetat inchore longam"
(The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long)
and then the poem:

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 the misty dream
Our path emerges for awhile , Then closes
Whin a dream.

[Lucy]

I really didn't like this collection. The works feel insincere and effete, I wanted to tell the poet to take a large hoe and a shovel also, and dig till he gently perspired. That would have made him feel better.

[Dominic Carlone]

The introductory memoir by Arthur Symons itself deserves five stars of honourable mention.

[August]

A personal favorite...people tend to pass over him as a minor poet (term I dislike), but was at one time revered by T.S. Eliot as the poets' poet.

[Some]

The Pierrot of the Minute is one of the most charming things I've ever read.