The Poetry of Dowson by Ernest Dowson

First published:Verses, 1896; The Pierrot of the Minute, 1897; Decorations, 1899

Critical Evaluation:

If a choice had to be made of the most typical member of the tragic and wasted generation of the “yellow Nineties,” that choice would almost inevitably be Ernest Dowson, for in so many ways did his short life fit into what came to be the established pattern of the period. His unhappy love affair with the daughter of a Polish restaurateur, conversion to Roman Catholicism, alcoholism, and early death—all these details, plus the publication of only two small volumes of poems and a verse play, give us, in the career of one man, a portrait of the age. His photograph, taken while he was at Oxford, shows us a shy, limp figure, marked by unusually large eyes that seem fixed in the dreamlike stare of a somnambulist; the drawing by Rothenstein is of a man so dim as to resemble Max Beerbohm’s Enoch Soames.

The fantastic decade, variously known as “the yellow Nineties” and “the Beardsly Period,” was, above all, the period of the minor poet. After the giants of the Victorian Age had left the scene, there was no one to take their places, and English poetry suffered a sharp decline. By 1895, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold were dead; Swinburne had been incarcerated in Putney under the watchful eye of Watts-Dunton; and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement had spent its force. To be sure, Kipling had, in 1886 and 1892, published his two most famous volumes of poems; but Kipling was the precise opposite of “the poet’s poet”; he was, in spite of his great gifts, a popular writer who had no influence on contemporary literature. The really outstanding talent of the period, that of A. E. Housman with his A Shropshire Lad of 1896, was not to be widely recognized until many years later. Thus the stage was occupied only by these minor figures: Dowson, John Gray, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, who seem in retrospect, as perhaps do the minor poets of any period, to have been conventionally grouped.

A consideration of the work of any of these minor poets always leads to a consideration of the influence upon it of French poetry and particularly that of Paul Verlaine. Two aspects of Verlaine’s work are to be noted here. In 1869 he had published his Fetes galantes and in 1874 his Romances sans paroles. The first of these was an evocation of the eighteenth century, the formal gardens of Versailles where, in the twilight of an autumn evening, the Abbes and shepherdesses, Pierrot and Columbine, stroll along the paths between the clipped yews:

Their short vests, silken and bright,Their long pale silken trains,Their elegance of delight,Twine soft blue silken chains.And the mandolines and they,Faintlier breathing, swoonInto the rose and greyEcstasy of the moon.

It is the world of brocaded coats and elaborately curled wigs, depicted so superbly by Beardsley in his illustration for Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, that Verlaine sought to reanimate and that Dowson used as the background of his slight verse drama, The Pierrot of the Minute, which is a Verlaine poem expanded into a colloquy in rhyming couplets between Pierrot and a Moon Maiden. Quite appropriately, the volume was provided with five illustrations by Beardsley. The scene is laid in the Parc du Petit Trianon, in the twilight, and the opening lines give a fair impression of the style:

My journey’s end! This surely is thegladeWhich I was promised: I have wellobeyed!A clue of lilies I was bid to find,Where the green alleys most obscurelywind;Where tall oaks darkliest canopy o’er-head,And moss and violet make the softestbed. . . .

This passage is reminiscent of Verlaine’s “Nuit du Walpurgis Classique” with its delightful description of a garden by Lenotre: “correct, ridicule et charmant.” Dowson knew French well, having traveled much in France, and Verlaine was one of his favorite poets. This little play is obviously intended to be an airy trifle, yet it is suffused with an atmosphere of gentle melancholy, and this is the atmosphere that pervades all of Dowson’s work.

Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles (songs without words) had an even greater influence on the English poetry of the 1890’s than did his eighteenth century fantasies. In his famous “Art poetique” he had proclaimed the doctrine of “music before everything” and that of the “nuance,” the last fine shade that joins “the dream to the dream and the flute to the horn.” In accordance with this theory, he wrote some of his most famous pieces: “La lune blanche,” “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” for example, in which the subject of the poem is reduced to a minimum, and the verses become quite literally a song without words. Dowson did indeed compose a “Chanson sans paroles,” which begins

In the deep violet air,Not a leaf is stirred;There is no sound heardBut afar, the rare,Trilled voice of a bird.

The poem then proceeds in the same manner as do the poems of Verlaine. Further, Dowson translated four of Verlaine’s poems. Although he modestly gave them the group title of “After Paul Verlaine,” they are excellent translations, so akin were the minds of the two poets. But translating Verlaine was a standard gesture of the period: both Gray and Symons produced versions of the Frenchman’s poems; and Wilde, who copied everyone, imitated him shamelessly.

The Roman Church, aware of the embarrassing death of Anglo-Saxon religious writers in modern times, has sought to include Dowson in its list of Catholic poets. A Roman Catholic he certainly became. How sincere his conversion may have been is, of course impossible to judge because first, there is a vast difference between being a Roman Catholic poet and being merely a Roman Catholic and a poet; second, “aesthetic Catholicism” was an important part of the attitude of the period. Again we recall Enoch Soames, who described himself as a “Catholic diabolist,” thereby showing how well Beerbohm had caught the mood of the period. Johnson and Gray were both converts, the latter eventually entering the priesthood; even Wilde died in the arms of the Church. And had not Verlaine, as a result of his prison experience, returned to the faith, to write a series of humble yet beautiful religious poems? Since the poets of this period sought to turn their backs upon the contemporary world, since the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” was supreme, quite naturally the Roman Church, with its vast antiquity, its continuity from the Middle Ages, its elaborate ritual, exercised an enormous appeal. Dowson, in his few religious poems, is the perfect example of the “aesthetic Catholic.” He did not write of an overwhelming religious experience, as did Francis Thompson in “The Hound of Heaven,” the one really great religious poem of this period; in such verses as “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” “Benedictio Domini,” and “Carthusians,” he was haunted by the withdrawn peace of the religious life, its remoteness from the “voice of London, inarticulate,/Hoarse and blaspheming.” Of the Carthusians he asks:

Through what long heaviness, assayedin what strange fire,Have these white monks beenbrought into the way of peace,Despising the world’s wisdom and theworld’s desire,Which from the body of this death-bring no release?

This poem forms a natural and interesting contrast with Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” written more than a generation earlier. To Arnold, the Carthusian monks were a relic of an age that was dead, an age that he could wistfully admire but which he could not embrace. To Dowson, these monks represented quietude, an escape from an age that he found intolerable.

But though he sang always in a minor, autumnal key, Dowson wrote at least one poem which all anthologies of English poetry include: his famous “Cynara,” or, to give it the full, sonorous Latin title, the quotation from the author’s favorite Horace, “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.” The gentle melancholy, the haunting refrain, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion,” have made this short poem a permanent part of our literature. The weariness, the satiety that were so much a part of the mood of the 1890’s are there; yet somehow the poem rises above being merely a period piece and attains, if certainly not to the first, at least to the second rank of high poetry.

Arthur Symons, the only poet of the 1890’s to survive into our own time, makes several telling points in his study of Dowson. He calls him “a child, clamouring for so many things, all impossible.” Francois Coppee had said much the same about Verlaine, describing him as a child whom life had wounded cruelly. But Symons continues with the further shrewd observation that Dowson’s experiences in the low-life of London and Paris would have made great poets out of many men—as was true of Villon—but that for Dowson they did very little. “He sang,” as Symons points out, “one tune over and over, and no one listened to him.” It is, perhaps, this very evenness of tone, this constant air of gentle resignation, that keep him in the background of poetry. In fact, it is this singing of one tune again and again that causes the poetry of the 1890’s to pall. For some reason, difficult to understand, no really great poetry came out of these broken and tragic lives. Again we think of Villon and of what he brought from the underworld of Paris and the lodgings of Fat Margot, “within this brothel where we keep our state.” The 1890’s on the contrary, were the age of the minor poet, “the idle singer of an empty day.”