POETS Day! Ernest Dowson

He was more of a carouser than ballroom type, but did a little time at Oxford when students were gentlemen expected to be up on proper tie knots, Latin double entendres, and new waltzes by Strauss.

Illustration by Rene Sears

In New Amsterdam, kids played hoekje spelen, or “playing corner.” Basically, it was hide-n-go-seek. And that’s how we get the phrase “playing hooky.” Or not. There are other, more boring, etymologies, but they’re boring. So hoekje.

Truant comes from Middle English “truand,” which in turn comes from Old French “truant” and probably another turn to something Celtic. The Old French word means “beggar,” “vagabond,” or “rogue” and was used to denote someone who doesn’t pull their weight. Rogues are not boring.

Don’t be boring. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s all manner of mischief to get up to on a Friday afternoon.

First, some verse.

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Villanelle of the Poet’s Road
Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)

Wine and women and song,
Three things garnish our way:
Yet the day is over long.

Lest we do our youth wrong,
Gather them while we may:
Wine and women and song.

Three things render us strong,
Vine leaves, kisses and bay;
Yet is day over long.

Unto us they belong,
Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and women and song.

We, as we pass along,
Are sad that they will not stay;
Yet is day over long.

Fruits and flowers among,
What is better than they:
Wine and woman and song?
Yet is day over long.

Ernest Dowson didn’t come up with the phrase “wine, women, and song.” It’s hard to say who did. Several sources claim an ancient origin, but get beyond the claims and they’re thin on specifics. You read “Horace wrote many odes about women as well as on the themes of wine and song,” and end up grumbling to the screen that that’s not the same thing.

As best I can tell, “Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang, der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang,” or “Who loves not wine women and song remains a fool his whole life long,” showed up as a popular proverb in last gasp Holy Roman Empire. The phrase has been erroneously ascribed to Martin Luther. That’s what I’m told. Thackeray believed it though, writing in The Adventures of Philip, “Then sing, as Martin Luther sang… ‘Who loves not Woman, Wine, and Song, / A Fool remains his whole Life long.’”

I have two sources telling me that “Villanelle of the Poet’s Road” was first published in 1899 in Dowson’s Decorations in Verse and Prose though I haven’t been able to confirm for certain. There’s an impressively aged copy for sale on Amazon, but no cheater’s “read a sample” option that usually shows a table of contents. Crickets from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. That doesn’t really matter as he didn’t publish any books of poetry until 1896, so he’d at least heard the wine, women, and song litany in the title of a popular Strauss Opus from 1889. He was more of a carouser than ballroom type, but did a little time at Oxford when students were gentlemen expected to be up on proper tie knots, Latin double entendres, and new waltzes by Strauss.

Carousing might be too gentile a word, though it’s stuck in my mind because of this line from Wikipedia: “He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils.” There’s breathlessness over medical and law students later reserved for jazz musicians. I’m imagining sweatered aunts and widows consoling his wrought mother, “Everything was fine with young Ernest until he fell in with the medical school crowd. There was nothing you could do.” I guess the students had money and liked to slum the theaters and dining halls with Dowson. He was an Oxford drop out so he spoke the right language and his dad owned a drydock so he wasn’t without money himself, though not money – he still had to work at the drydock. He liked to take entertainers out for dinner too, so maybe there was a burgeoning “consorts with jazz musicians” issue even though there had yet to be jazz musicians. I’ve read the word “decadent” a good bit in looking into his life and work. “Hedonistic” is up there, too.

In 1889 Dowson wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘I absolutely decline to see socca’ matches’. From that, the OED credits him with the first known written instance of the word “soccer,” even though he didn’t spell it as the British now insist they nevuh evuh used it. Like “wine, women, and song” he didn’t coin “socca,” at least we don’t think so. Short for “Association,” so from “Association Football,” it’s believed to have been tossed about as Oxford student slang for while before Dowson put it in a letter to a friend I assume he assumed would understand. But there are phrases he did coin, ones that we know well.

There’s a very famous 1962 film about alcoholic descent, starring Jack Lemon and Lee Remick, called Days of Wine and Roses. I didn’t realize there was a period during which The Academy held separate Oscar categories for black and white and color films, but the movie was nominated for Best Director and Best Costume Design, both in the black and white subcategory. Lemon and Remick were both nominated as Best Actor and Actress respectively. The title song, also named “Days of Wine and Roses,” by Henry Mancini with Johnny Mercer lyrics sung by Andy Williams, won Best Song. It picked up Song of the Year and Best Background Arrangement Grammys. Williams was nominated but didn’t win. Williams was also nominated for Album of the Year (Other than Classical) for Days of Wine and Roses and other TV Requests. That didn’t win either, but Mancini won the Grammy for Record of the Year with Days of Wine and Roses. They really flogged this thing.

The title is taken from the following plaintive by Dowson.

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetet Incohare Longam
(The Shortness of Life Forbids Us From Beginning a Long Hope)

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

The Lemon/Remick picture was not the most famous movie that took its title from a Dowson line.

I’m not sure if Dowson meeting Adelaide Foltinowicz was the impetus for his conversion to Catholicism, or just someone he met around the the time of his catechizing. In either case, he proposed to the Polish Catholic girl, who he nicknamed Missy, in 1893. He was twenty-five and she was just fifteen, but he’d been wooing her since the two met at her parents’ restaurant when she was eleven. There’s no amount of things-were-different-then-and-Romeo-and-Juliet-were-only-fouteen that glosses this over. She said no and later (much) married a tailor. Dowson was distraught and took off for Belgium and later Paris. When he returned four years later, he took rooms owned by and directly above the rooms occupied by the Foltinowicz family and their, at the time, unmarried daughter. Trying to find out how that came about, through a quick search I found an informative site about poets and their lovers, but the tone was off; a bit at first and then more so—not disapproving enough. Then I noticed all the articles were about poets and their much younger lovers. Long story short, there’s a great deal of documentation regarding Dowson, Adelaide, and at least two other of his “platonic experiments,” his words, with young girls. I won’t link because I don’t want anyone else to find their name and IP address on the same damn watchlist I’ve no doubt stumbled my way onto.

Dowson wrote of Adelaide as a lost eternal love. In “Non sum qualis eram bonae regno Cynarea” (I am not what I was under the reign of the good Cynara), he writes that his attempts to find joy and destractions in a life without her are in vain as her memory, even what wisps he retains, haunt him and cast a shadow over the whole, that there were no highs as high as there were with her and he’s forever true despite his efforts.

The Cynara he mentions is an allusion to a lost love of the Roman poet Horace, for whom she remained a perfection no later love could compare to.

From Book iv, Ode 1
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC)
Translated by David Ferry (1924-2023)

Venus, it seems that now
Your wars are starting again.
Spare me, spare me, I pray.
I am not what I was
When tender Cynara ruled me.

An ignorant reading of Dowson’s poem is as sweet and sad: driven to debauchery and hedonism, hunting distraction, nothing can drive the love he must be true to from his mind. Knowing the actualities of his infatuation sours the poem. “No matter how hard I try, I remain your committed paedo.”

Back to movie titles. In the first line of the third stanza, you’ll see “gone with the wind.” I won’t bother telling you how many awards that movie got. And yes, I know it was a book first. Tomorrow Is Another Day was Margaret Mitchell’s working title. She also considered Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars, and the doubtless would-have-been-sales-killing Tote the Weary Load before deciding Dowson’s poetic phrase had the “far away, faintly sad sound I wanted.”

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy 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.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Dowson considered himself a novelist first and foremost, but he probably made more from his translations than his original works. Notably, he was the first to bring Dangerous Liaisons to an English audience. Poetry was an indulgence he didn’t take very seriously until he was rejected by a fifteen-year-old but thence was fairly prolific. He was taken seriously enough by his peers as a member of The Rhymers, a loose poetic society that counted W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson among its membership. His output across written genres isn’t grand but he didn’t live all that long.

Somewhere around the time he proposed to Adelaide, a salacious story splashed across front pages about a kidnapped sixteen year old and her much older disreputable captor. Dowson went into a panic seeing his friends react and express disgust at dirty old men predating young girls. His letters show real fear that he might be “misunderstood.” When his friend Oscar Wilde was accused of indecency, London society ostracized him. Wilde was treated as a leper, though not by Dowson, and I wonder if Dowson felt sympathy or a sense of “but by the grace go I” pity.

In any case, he was known to Wilde’s biographer, Robert Sherard, who found the drunken and dying Dowson in a wine bar, and took him home to convalesce. Dowson wasn’t penniless, but he might as well have been. There was £1000 intestate after the death of his parents, but squabbling over that had gone on for some time. After six weeks at Sherard’s home, Dawson died of whatever cause was fashionably ascribed to alcoholism at the time.

This last inspired and lent some lyrics to a 2024 Cure song called “Alone.” If you can believe it, the Cure are still together and still putting out songs.

Dregs

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropped curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]