Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam - Horace
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love, 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 stream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Ernest Dowson, 1896
 |
Ernest
Dowson (1867-1900)
was an English poet whose passion and despair
revolved around a girl, Adelaide (Cynara),
whom he first met when she was eleven.
He wrote
some of his best work for her, but she, unable to relate to his verse or return
his passion,
married a tailor - and Dowson spent the rest of his short life bereft and adrift.
The title
of this celebration of brevity is from Horace's Ode I: Life's brevity
prevents
us from fulfilling our potential.
 |
Dowson was
a friend of Yeats, of Symons, of Gide and Verlaine, amongst others.
As with Verlaine, alcohol was more a master than a friend, and he had constant
sad recourse,
when in France, to absinthe, which
he referred to as Opaline.
Like Verlaine, his personal appearance and hygiene disgusted the bourgeois,
though his poetry was well-received.
He attended Verlaine's funeral,
and was one of the very few supporters and final friends of Oscar Wilde.
'The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And help and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings...'
from DREGS, 1898
Dowson is mentioned in the great Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into
Night,
and Michael Moorcock acknowledged his influence in his Dancers at the End
of Time trilogy,
using two lines of Dowson's as titles: The Hollow Lands and The End
of All Songs.
The final line of Jad Adams' biography, Madder Music, Stronger Wine (2000) is:
'Life presented him with suffering, and he returned it with beauty.'
'Let
us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band...'
from A LAST WORD, 1899.
