BIBLIOFILE

The life and death of the poet Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) was recalled on August 2nd 2010, by a service in Brockley & Ladywell cemetery, London SE4 to mark the renovation of his vandalised gravestone. Dowson’s literary reputation has long been in decline, and is now mainly based on the legacy of such kitsch fragments as “the days of wine and roses” and “gone with the wind”, though the contrast between the rarified imagery of Dowson’s short poems and his often miserable existence makes him a fascinating figure, a casualty of the decadent nineties.

Dowson emerges from biographical accounts as a charming dead beat who suffered for his art, and though associated with many fin-de-siècle literary figures, was a marginal, ill at ease member of the Rhymer’s Club, happier drinking absinthe and playing billiards in The Cock, a pub in Shaftesbury Avenue, or carousing in the Alhambra music hall, before either finding a night’s kip on someone’s floor, or making the long trudge back to the unprofitable family dry docking business in Limehouse. A contributor to such journals as Temple Bar, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, chain smoking, congenital TB, and thujone poisoning (the active component of absinthe) steadily wore him down, until his early death in Catford.

Very much a disciple of fellow Catholic Paul Verlaine (whose funeral he attended), Dowson’s collection Verses (1896), showcases his ornamental lyricism. The writing conveys the defeated, somnambulistic mood of a psyche that has imported the French Alexandrine, but is unable to reconcile it with Anglo-Saxon English. Often motivated by unrequited love, or guilt, these poems are cloying and painful to read, with a patina of Classical allusion. However if you excuse Dowson’s fatalism there is much that is admirable in his verse, especially a liking for the moon, night time and amorous trysts, most famously with his beloved muse Cynara. Indeed in Arnold Schoenberg’s lush yet edgy Four Orchestral Songs, Opus 22 № 1 (1916), the composer set a translation by Stefan George of the words of Dowson’s poem ‘Seraphita’…

SERAPHITA

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!

Stoop 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.

So Dowson does have an afterlife, and is commemorated by a group of enthusiastic readers who meet each year, and manage a Facebook page on his behalf. It’s nice also to think of him playing "blind chivvy", a game of his own making that involved racing his friend R. Thurston Hopkins from point A to point B across London using only alleys and short cuts, psychogeography avant la lettre.

To quote from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Grey Rock’ (1914) in words addressed to Old Cheshire Cheese habitués Lionel Johnson and Dowson, “You kept the Muses’ sterner laws, and unrepenting faced your ends”.

This biographical stub accompanies my elegy for Dowson 'The Far Shore' published for the first time in The White Review #3, 2011. www.thewhitereview.org