The dream grew vague, I moulded with my hands
The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist
I touched; and pigments reverently placed
Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains,
Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes,
And gems whose hot harsh names are never said
I was a masseur; and my fingers bled
With wonder as I touched their awful limbs.
Suddenly, in the marble trough there seems
O, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness!
A twylipped scarlet pansie. My caress
Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet,
Adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat
Of treatment once heard in a hospital
For plagues that fascinate, but half appal.
So, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold;
Thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold;
Thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth;
The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth;
And on the belly, pallid blushes crept,
That maddened me, until I laughed and wept.
Here we have a long amorous catalogue. It is the catalogue age which comes via Oscar Wilde’s Sphinx and Salomé from certain French writers. But this does not make up for the singing power of the poet, and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the period, Dowson and Davidson.
Indeed, there is no one in the nineties worthier of the honourable title of poet than Ernest Dowson. With his unsatisfied passion for Adelaide in Soho; his cry for ‘madder music and for stronger wine’; his æsthetic theories, such as that the letter ‘v’ was the most beautiful of the letters; his reverence for things French, he has caused Mr. Symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful portrait of a true enfant de Bohême. Robert Harborough Sherard has also kept the Dowson tradition up in his description of the death of the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his Twenty Years in Paris, a work which contains much interesting material for a study of the nineties. But Victor Plarr, another poet of the nineties, enraged at the incompleteness of these pictures, has tried to give us in his reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia, the other facet of Dowson—the poète intime known to few.
It is no question of ours, in a brief summary like this, which is the truer portrait of Dowson; whether he was or was not like Keats in his personal appearance; whether Arthur Moore and Dowson wrote alternate chapters of A Comedy of Masks; whether in his last days or not Leonard Smithers used to pay him thirty shillings a week for all he could do; whether he used to pray or not in front of the bearded Virgin at Arques; whether he used to drink hashish or not. All these problems are outside the beauty of the lyric poetry of Dowson; and it is by his poetry and not because of all these rumours around his brief life that he will live.
He was the poet impressionist of momentary emotions, and poetry with him was, as Stéphane Mallarmé said, ‘the language of a crisis.’ Each Dowson poem is more or less the feverish impression of a hectical crisis. For in a way he takes off where Keats ended, for Keats was becoming a hectic, while Dowson started out as one.
Exceeding sorrow
Consumeth my sad heart!
Because to-morrow
We must part.
Now is exceeding sorrow
All my part!...
Be no word spoken;
Weep nothing: let a pale
Silence, unbroken
Silence prevail!
Prithee, be no word spoken,
Lest I fail!
His earliest poem to attract attention was Amor Umbratilis, which appeared in Horne’s Century Guild Hobby Horse. It has the real Dowson note, and marks him down at once as one of those poets who are by nature buveurs de lune. That was in 1891. In 1892 came out the first book of the Rhymers’ Club, and with six poems of Dowson in it he definitely took his place in the movement. It is said that the Oscar Wilde set sent him a telegram shortly after this ‘peremptorily ordering him to appear at the Café Royal to lunch with the then great man.’ Dowson was flattered, and might well be, for Wilde was a splendid judge of good work.