Ernest Dowson - a brilliant poet, in his fashion

By any yardstick, the English poet Ernest Dowson, who died in 1900 at the age of 32, was a miserable 

little bleeder. His life, excellently described in Jad Adams’s 2000 biography, Madder Music, 

Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, seems to have been a pretty grim affair, scarred by failure, 

poverty, alcoholism,  tuberculosis (possibly), and unrequited love (definitely). 

As to his non-literary life, he attended Oxford, but left early. He worked for a while at his father’s dry-docking business in Limehouse. His father, suffering from advanced TB, took his own life by swallowing chloral hydrate. His mother, another consumptive, hanged herself. The most momentous event in Dowson’s life meeting Adelaide Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurateur in London. She was either 11 or 12 years old at the time, and he was besotted with her for the rest of his life. 

When Adelaide reached 15, Dowson proposed: she turned him down and eventually married a tailor who lodged above the restaurant. Although the girl’s charms appear to have been somewhat lost on Dowson’s contemporaries, her rejection of him seems to have ensured that the rest of his short life would be spent in a funk of depressive longing (it’s also possible that, had she agreed to marry him, his existence would have proved just as bleak – he wasn’t basically a barrel of laughs). He died at the cottage of an acquaintance in Catford, probably from the combined effects of alcoholism and consumption.

As for his literary life, Dowson was a member of the late 19th Century Decadent movement. His acquaintances included Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley and Lionel Johnson. He contributed frequently to the Yellow Book and the Savoy, produced several translations of French novels, two co-written novels of his own, a number of short stories, a play, and two collections of poetry. Much admired by other poets, he was a member of the Rhymers’ Club. 

He managed all this while occasionally working at his father’s business (the mind boggles),”carousing” with showgirls, generally drinking like a fish, and spending quite a bit of time running out of money in France (where he hung out with Oscar Wilde, who was fresh out of prison). So energetic were the Victorians, that even a languid, floppy, drink-befuddled miserabilist like Dowson comes across as a bit of a Stakhanovite. 

Today, he is best known to poetry readers for two specific poems, and to the general public thanks to two phrases – one from each of those poems – which have subsequently entered our language: “gone with the wind” and “days of wine and roses”.

Dowson’s greatest creation has a title, taken from Horace’s Odes, which simply trips off the tongue: “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae” – roughly, “I was not as I was under the reign of kind Cynara” – and is generally thought to be about Adelaide. 

The first of the poem’s four six-line stanzas sets the tone:

        Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

        There fell they shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

        Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

        And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

            Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

        I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Lines four and six are repeated in each of the subsequent stanzas: after one reading, they are lodged in the mind forever. The wan, swooning, disease-ridden language should make the poem utterly enervating – “desolate”, “sick”, “bowed”, “fell”, “shed” - but there’s a sort of urgency, an almost vigorous relishing of the hopelessness of the poet’s situation, that makes it quite compelling. Tennyson manages the same trick in several of his poems, and, of course, there’s something very reminiscent of Poe’ short stories in Cynara’s atmosphere.

The most famous line in the poem – “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” – is of course masterly in its juxtaposition of the bold declaration of the first part, and the meaning-packed qualification provided by the phrase “in my fashion”.

The poem abounds in great lines, arresting images and memorable phrases: “Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet…”, “I called for madder music, and for stronger wine…”, “When I awoke and found the dawn was gray”, “…hungry for the lips of my desire”, “Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay”, and, of course, “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind…”.

But my favourite lines, very Poe-like indeed, are:

            But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

            Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine…

That last phrase, “the night is thine”, contains all the shivery power of the very best Victorian ghost stories.

I doubt if many of us would have wanted to live Ernest Dowson’s life – but what we wouldn’t give for just a fraction of the gloomy little bugger’s talent.