Poet of the Past: Ernest Dowson
AS soon as the Christmas decorations have been put away and festive indulgences subjected to a regime of New Year resolutions, you know that the gloomladen days of January have arrived. These days at the start of the new year have, over the centuries, inspired poets to express wistfulness for happier times.
Ernest Dowson, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Aubrey Beardsley, was no exception. This little-known – and even less understood – poet was a major figure in the romantic late-Victorian literary world. Writer of many poems, novels and short stories, he can also be credited with introducing into the English language such well-known expressions as “gone with the wind” and “days of wine and roses”.
Ernest Christopher Dowson was born into a comfortably-off, middle-class family in Lee, south-east London, on 2 August, 1867. Alfred, his father, had inherited the family dry-dock and ship-repair business on the River Thames. His mother, Annie Swan, described as a hauntingly lovely, fragile woman, gave birth to Ernest when she was 18 years old. Within a few years, however, Alfred had developed the first signs of consumption, or tuberculosis. For the sake of his health, the family moved to the south of France.
It was here, and in Italy, that young Ernest received his education from a variety of tutors. Although woefully ignorant of subjects such as geography and mathematics, he became proficient in languages, especially French and Latin, and developed a deep love of literature. He entered Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1886, but left after two years without obtaining his degree. However, many of the friendships he made there were to last throughout his life.
On leaving university, he joined his father in the dry-dock business. But the smaller docks were finding it increasingly difficult to compete. As Alfred’s health deteriorated, money dwindled and the business was eventually declared bankrupt.
It was around this time that
Dowson met Adelaide, the 12-yearold daughter of a Polish tailor who ran a restaurant in Soho, and this girl, who epitomised purity and beauty, was to remain the love of his life.
There has never been any suggestion of anything inappropriate between the pair but Ernest’s infatuation never waned and surfaced in probably his best-known poem,
Cynara, in which the last line of each of the four stanzas is “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion”. These words became the inspiration for Cole Porter when writing “I’m always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion,” in the musical
Kiss Me, Kate.
By 1890, Dowson was one of a small group of poets and writers who had formed the Rhymers’ Club. They met every month in the Cheshire Cheese, a long-established inn in Fleet Street. These bohemian characters, Wilde amongst them, gave rise to a movement known as “The Decadents”, whose hedonistic lifestyle at the end of the 19th century was eventually to be shattered forever by World War I. Ernest, now living a life of late nights, heavy drinking and sexual excess in the company of various women, also suffered his first attack of tuberculosis. In 1894 his father, by now in an advanced stage of the disease, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate, prescribed to cure insomnia. Six months later, severely depressed by her husband’s death and, most probably, Ernest’s dissolute lifestyle, his mother was found hanged in the bedroom of her home.
After two such painful setbacks, Dowson’s life began to go rapidly downhill. Although he continued to write, and spent two years travelling in France, his tuberculosis, exacerbated by alcoholism and depression, became steadily worse. Almost penniless and living as a vagrant, carrying nothing more than his tattered book of verse, he finally found shelter with friends Robert Sherard and his wife, who took him into their London home. He spent the last six weeks of his life there before he died, aged 32, on 23 February, 1900.
Dowson is buried in the Catholic section of Ladywell Cemetery – he had converted 10 years earlier – less than two miles from where he was born. In spite of his tragic life, he was a brilliant craftsman of verse who left behind an inimitable legacy of enchanting words and phrases. His evocative poem Transition, published posthumously in Decorations in 1900, with its wintry starkness, sense of longing and images of a countryside changing inexorably with the seasons, shows that for all his personal torment he was always conscious of beauty – not simply in his surroundings, but also in human nature.