Radiance, Heights

Selected Poems: 1931-2004 
by Czesław Miłosz



"Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope."
- from "Incantation", 1968 (p 87)





His poetry runs the gamut of feeling and thought, of nature and man, of beauty and the truth of poetry. The author of The Captive Mind, a great statement about the effects of totalitarianism, Czeslaw Milosz is even better when his daimon inspires him to write poetry. This selection covers his work over more than seven decades beginning with his early days in Poland, underground during the War, and beyond into his time in America. His survival, overcoming the ordeal of war and suppression gives his poetry a nobility that seems palpable on every page. 

The following poem resonates with me along with others of his best from the Selected Poems.  Just as he fought the battle of ideas, the books are durable soldiers going into battle with a simple "We are,";  confident in the knowledge that they are "more durable than we are".  The reference to the dismal twentieth century with its fires and flame is tempered by the optimism of the closing:  "Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."


And Yet the Books 

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.


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Poem for Meditation

Sonnet #116




How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.


The use of music and the delight in the dance make this one of my favorite sonnets.  But Shakespeare adds to the fun with his envy of the nimble "jacks" and his wish that it would be his lips and not the lute that would be tickled by her kiss.   It is reminiscent of the part in Taming of the Shrew where Kate calls her music tutor “rascal fiddler and twangling jack.”  She was not an enthusiastic musician.

Splendor of Life

THE DANCE OF LIFE

by: Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

GRACIOUS and lovable and sweet,

She made his jaded pulses beat,

And made the glare of streets grow dim

And life more soft and hushed for him....

Over her shoulder now she smiled

Trustfully to him, like a child,

The while her fingers gayly moved

Alonge these white keys dearly loved,

Making them laugh a jocund measure,

Making them show and sing her pleasure....

A smile that dwelt upon his eyes,

To see what mood might therein rise,--

What point of soft light seen afar

Which might dilate to moon or star....

A smile that for a second space

Brooded wistfully on her face,

Opening soft her spirit's door,

Disclosing depths undreamed before:

Passionate depths of half-seen flame,

Young loveliness despising shame,

Desire that trembled to meet desire,

And fire that yearned to fuse with fire....

And lightly then she turned away,

Ironic music rippled gay,--

Subtle sarcastic flippancies

Disguising speechless ecstasies...

"Play something else..." He rose to turn

The pages, while the deep nocturne

Struck slow rich chords of plangent pain,

Beautiful, into heart and brain;

A tortured, anguished, suffering thing

That seemed at once to cry and sing;

Despairing love that strove to find

The face beloved with fingers blind.

He saw her body's slender grace,

This drooping shoulder, shadowed face;

All of her body, hidden so

In saffron satin's flush and flow,--

Its white and simple loveliness,--

Came on his heart like giddiness,

Seductive as this music came;

Until her body seemed like flame,--

Intense white flame, so swiftly moving

That it gave scarcely time for loving;

But rapid as the sun she seemed,

A blinding light that flowed and streamed

And sang and shone through roaring space....

The sun itself! for now her face,

Wherein this music's whole soul dwelt,

Drew him like helpless star, he felt

A fierce compulsion, reckless, mad,

A sweet compulsion, troubled, glad,

His trembling hands went out to her,

Her cool flesh made his senses blur;

While, head thrown backward, sinking dim,

She opened wide her soul to him....

Past his life went whirls of lights,

Chaos of music, days and nights,

Her wild eyes yearned to lure him in

And close him up in dark of sin,

To lure him in and drink him down

And all his soul in love to drown....

Her nakedness he seemed to see.

And breast to breast, and knee to knee,

Tremulous, breathless, swaying, burning,

Body to beautiful body yearning,

In joy and terror, flesh to flesh,

They flamed in passion's fine red mesh,--

Living in one short breath again

The cosmic tide's whole bliss and pain,

Darkness and ether, nebulous fire,

Vast suns whirled forth by vast desire,

Huge moons flung out with monstrous mirth

And stars in glorious hells of birth,

All jubilating, blazing, reeling,

An orgiastic splendor wheeling,

Moon torn from earth and star from sun

In screaming pain, titanic fun,

And stars whirled back to sun again

To be consumed in flaming pain!...

In them at last all life was met:

They were God's self! This earth had set.

Mad fires of life sang through their veins,

Ruinous blisses, joyous pains,

Life the destroyer, life the breaker,

And death, the everlasting maker....

Turns and Movies and Other Tales in Verse by Conrad Aiken. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916.

Favorite Poets

Hart Crane

July 21 was the birthday of Hart Crane, one of my favorite poets.  He was  born Harold Hart Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio in 1899. His mother was a Chicago debutante and his father was a very successful candy businessman who actually invented the Lifesaver, the popular ring-shaped mint.

By the time Crane was a teenager, he knew that he was gay, and he was fascinated by the life and career of Oscar Wilde. When his parents' marriage fell apart, Crane dropped out of school and took a train from Cleveland to New York to begin life as a poet. He loved being in New York, hanging out with poets like E.E. Cummings and Allen Tate. But he had trouble making a living there, couldn't hold down a job. His drinking got worse and in 1932, at the age of 33, he killed himself by jumping overboard a steamship on his way from Mexico to New York. He left behind his masterpiece, The Bridge (1930).  Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike (including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom), as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.

To Brooklyn Bridge


by Hart Crane

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Winter and Reading

Two Favorite Poets

"Winter for a Moment Takes the Mind" 



Winter for a moment takes the mind; the snow
Falls past the arclight; icicles guard a wall;
The wind moans through a crack in the window;
A keen sparkle of frost is on the sill.
Only for a moment; as spring too might engage it,
With a single crocus in the loam, or a pair of birds;
Or summer with hot grass; or autumn with a yellow leaf.

Winter is there, outside, is here in me:
Drapes the planets with snow, deepens the ice on the moon,
Darkens the darkness that was already darkness.
The mind too has its snows, its slippery paths,
Walls bayonetted with ice, leaves ice-encased.
Here is the in-drawn room, to which you return
When the wind blows from Arcturus: here is the fire
At which you warm your hands and glaze your eyes;
The piano, on which you touch the cold treble;
Five notes like breaking icicles; and then silence.

The alarm-clock ticks, the pulse keeps time with it,
Night and the mind are full of sounds. I walk
From the fire-place, with its imaginary fire,
To the window, with its imaginary view.
Darkness, and snow ticking the window: silence,
And the knocking of chains on a motor-car, the tolling
Of a bronze bell, dedicated to Christ.
And then the uprush of angelic wings, the beating
Of wings demonic, from the abyss of the mind:
The darkness filled with a feathery whistling, wings
Numberless as the flakes of angelic snow,
The deep void swarming with wings and sound of wings,
The winnowing of chaos, the aliveness
Of depth and depth and depth dedicated to death.

Here are bickerings of the inconsequential,
The chatterings of the ridiculous, the iterations
Of the meaningless. Memory, like a juggler,
Tosses its colored balls into the light, and again
Receives them into darkness. Here is the absurd,
Grinning like an idiot, and the omnivorous quotidian,
Which will have its day. A handful of coins,
Tickets, items from the news, a soiled handerchief,
A letter to be answered, notice of a telephone call,
The petal of a flower in a volume of Shakespeare,
The program of a concert. The photograph, too,
Propped on the mantel, and beneath it a dry rosebud;
The laundry bill, matches, and ash-tray, Utamaro's
Pearl-fishers. And the rug, on which are still the crumbs
Of yesterday's feast. These are the void, the night,
And the angelic wings that make it sound.

What is the flower? It is not a sigh of color,
Suspiration of purple, sibilation of saffron,
Nor aureate exhalation from the tomb.
Yet it is these because you think of these,
An emanation of emanations, fragile
As light, or glisten, or gleam, or coruscation,
Creature of brightness, and as brightness brief.
What is the frost? It is not the sparkle of death,
The flash of time's wing, seeds of eternity;
Yet it is these because you think of these.
And you, because you think of these, are both
Frost and flower, the bright ambiguous syllable
Of which the meaning is both no and yes.

Here is the tragic, the distorting mirror
In which your gesture becomes grandiose;
Tears form and fall from your magnificent eyes,
The brow is noble, and the mouth is God's.
Here is the God who seeks his mother, Chaos, –
Confusion seeking solution, and life seeking death.
Here is the rose that woos the icicle; the icicle
That woos the rose. Here is the silence of silences
Which dreams of becoming a sound, and the sound
Which will perfect itself in silence. And all
These things are only the uprush from the void,
The wings angelic and demonic, the sound of the abyss
Dedicated to death. And this is you.

Stanza I from "Preludes for Memnon" by Conrad Aiken

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there. 

from The Collected Poems - Wallace Stevens


Here we have a magic moment of realization when the reader, with a book in his hands, recognizes himself, his world, the substance of things in what he is reading, so that the reader, the book, the summer night, the house, the world are all fused in an existential unity of real, inner and outer, truth.  



Collected Poems, Second Edition by Conrad Aiken. Oxford University Press, 1970.
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Poem for January

Childhood Among the Ferns
by Thomas Hardy

I sat one sprinkling day upon the lea,

Where tall-stemmed ferns spread out luxuriantly,

And nothing but those tall ferns sheltered me.

The rain gained strength, and damped each lopping frond,

Ran down their stalks beside me and beyond,

And shaped slow-creeping rivulets as I conned,

With pride, my spray-proofed house. And though anon

Some drops pierced its green rafters, I sat on,

Making pretence I was not rained upon.

The sun then burst, and brought forth a sweet breath

 From the limp ferns as they dried underneath:

I said: 'I could live on here thus till death;'

And queried in the green rays as I sate:

'Why should I have to grow to man's estate,

And this afar-noises World perambulate?'

Source:  The Complete Poems, Thomas Hardy

A Poem for Christmas Eve

 

THE OXEN

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

'Now they are all on their knees,"

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,"

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy ( 1840 - 1928 )*

*Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy.  Wordworth Editions. 1994

Among the Trees

by William Cullen Bryant

Oh ye who love to overhang the springs,

And stand by running waters, ye whose boughs

Make beautiful the rocks o'er which they play,

Who pile with foliage the great hills, and rear

A paradise upon the lonely plain,

Trees of the forest, and the open field!

Have ye no sense of being? Does the air,

The pure air, which I breathe with gladness, pass

In gushes o'er your delicate lungs, your leaves,

All unenjoyed? When on your winter's sleep

The sun shines warm, have ye no dreams of spring?

And when the glorious spring-time comes at last,

Have ye no joy of all your bursting buds,

And fragrant blooms, and melody of birds

To which your young leaves shiver? Do ye strive

And wrestle with the wind, yet know it not?

Feel ye no glory in your strength when he,

The exhausted Blusterer, flies beyond the hills,

And leaves you stronger yet? Or have ye not

A sense of loss when he has stripped your leaves,

Yet tender, and has splintered your fair boughs?

Does the loud bolt that smites you from the cloud

And rends you, fall unfelt? Do there not run

Strange shudderings through your fibres when the axe

Is raised against you, and the shining blade

Deals blow on blow, until, with all their boughs,

Your summits waver and ye fall to earth?

Know ye no sadness when the hurricane

Has swept the wood and snapped its sturdy stems

Asunder, or has wrenched, from out the soil,

The mightiest with their circles of strong roots,

And piled the ruin all along his path?

Nay, doubt we not that under the rough rind,

In the green veins of these fair growths of earth,

There dwells a nature that receives delight

From all the gentle processes of life,

And shrinks from loss of being. Dim and faint

May be the sense of pleasure and of pain,

As in our dreams; but, haply, real still.

Our sorrows touch you not. We watch beside

The beds of those who languish or who die,

And minister in sadness, while our hearts

Offer perpetual prayer for life and ease

And health to the beloved sufferers.

But ye, while anxious fear and fainting hope

Are in our chambers, ye rejoice without.

The funeral goes forth; a silent train

Moves slowly from the desolate home; our hearts

Are breaking as we lay away the loved,

Whom we shall see no more, in their last rest,

Their little cells within the burial-place.

Ye have no part in this distress; for still

The February sunshine steeps your boughs

And tints the buds and swells the leaves within;

While the song-sparrow, warbling from her perch,

Tells you that spring is near. The wind of May

Is sweet with breath of orchards, in whose boughs

The bees and every insect of the air

Make a perpetual murmur of delight,

And by whose flowers the humming-bird hangs poised

In air, and draws their sweets and darts away.

The linden, in the fervors of July,

Hums with a louder concert. When the wind

Sweeps the broad forest in its summer prime,

As when some master-hand exulting sweeps

The keys of some great organ, ye give forth

The music of the woodland depths, a hymn

Of gladness and of thanks. The hermit-thrush

Pipes his sweet note to make your arches ring;

The faithful robin, from the wayside elm,

Carols all day to cheer his sitting mate;

And when the autumn comes, the kings of earth,

In all their majesty, are not arrayed

As ye are, clothing the broad mountain-side

And spotting the smooth vales with red and gold;

While, swaying to the sudden breeze, ye fling

Your nuts to earth, and the brisk squirrel comes

To gather them, and barks with childish glee,

And scampers with them to his hollow oak.

Thus, as the seasons pass, ye keep alive

The cheerfulness of Nature, till in time

The constant misery which wrings the heart

Relents, and we rejoice with you again,

And glory in your beauty; till once more

We look with pleasure on your varnished leaves,

That gayly glance in sunshine, and can hear,

Delighted, the soft answer which your boughs

Utter in whispers to the babbling brook.

Ye have no history. I cannot know

Who, when the hillside trees were hewn away,

Haply two centuries since, bade spare this oak,

Leaning to shade, with his irregular arms,

Low-bent and long, the fount that from his roots

Slips through a bed of cresses toward the bay--

I know not who, but thank him that he left

The tree to flourish where the acorn fell,

And join these later days to that far time

While yet the Indian hunter drew the bow

In the dim woods, and the white woodman first

Opened these fields to sunshine, turned the soil

And strewed the wheat. An unremembered Past

Broods, like a presence, mid the long gray boughs

Of this old tree, which has outlived so long

The flitting generations of mankind.

Ye have no history. I ask in vain

Who planted on the slope this lofty group

Of ancient pear-trees that with spring-time burst

Into such breadth of bloom. One bears a scar

Where the quick lightning scored its trunk, yet still

It feels the breath of Spring, and every May

Is white with blossoms. Who it was that laid

Their infant roots in earth, and tenderly

Cherished the delicate sprays, I ask in vain,

Yet bless the unknown hand to which I owe

This annual festival of bees, these songs

Of birds within their leafy screen, these shouts

Of joy from children gathering up the fruit

Shaken in August from the willing boughs.

Ye that my hands have planted, or have spared,

Beside the way, or in the orchard-ground,

Or in the open meadow, ye whose boughs

With every summer spread a wider shade,

Whose herd in coming years shall lie at rest

Beneath your noontide shelter? who shall pluck

Your ripened fruit? who grave, as was the wont

Of simple pastoral ages, on the rind

Of my smooth beeches some beloved name?

Idly I ask; yet may the eyes that look

Upon you, in your later, nobler growth,

Look also on a nobler age than ours;

An age when, in the eternal strife between

Evil and Good, the Power of Good shall win

A grander mastery; when kings no more

Shall summon millions from the plough to learn

The trade of slaughter, and of populous realms

Make camps of war; when in our younger land

The hand of ruffian Violence, that now

Is insolently raised to smite, shall fall

Unnerved before the calm rebuke of Law,

And Fraud, his sly confederate, shrink, in shame,

Back to his covert, and forego his prey.

William Cullen Bryant, who was born during the presidency of George Washington and while still a teen wrote his best-known poem "Thanatopsis", is considered an early advocate of American literary nationalism.  His poetry, focusing on nature as a metaphor for truth as can be seen in the above, established a central pattern in the American literary tradition.

"Among the Trees" from The Poems of William Cullen Bryant.  The Heritage Press, New York.

Today's Shakespeare

Sonnet

 #140




CXL.


Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me so;
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know;
For if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee:
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be,
That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.

Selected Poems: 1931-2004

by Czesław Miłosz

"Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope."
- from Incantation, 1968 (p 87)


His poetry runs the gamut of feeling and thought, of nature and man, of beauty and the truth of poetry. The author of The Captive Mind, a great statement about the effects of totalitarianism, Czeslaw Milosz is even better when his daimon inspires him to write poetry. This selection covers his work over more than seven decades beginning with his early days in Poland, underground during the War, and beyond into his time in America. His survival, overcoming the ordeal of war and suppression gives his poetry a nobility that seems palpable on every page.




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Wordsworth & Coleridge

"an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted. . ." (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800)

The first edition of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was published on this day in 1798. A historic moment in poetry, it is the high-water mark of perhaps the most famous collaboration and friendship in literary history. The two remained close for another decade, but the fault lines were by then well established. Dorothy Wordsworth took up much of her brother’s emotional life, and after Wordsworth married (on this day in 1802) there was even less room for Coleridge. This became especially clear when Coleridge attempted to live in the same house with the other three, while maintaining his old, opium-fueled pattern of wild plans and dark moods. The poetic record shows the strain: in 1807, while Coleridge was publicly proclaiming his love and need for “O Friend! My comforter and guide! / Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!” (lines from “To William Wordsworth”), Wordsworth was penning:

A Complaint

There is a change—and I am poor;

Your love hath been, nor long ago,

A fountain at my fond heart's door,

Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

What happy moments did I count!

Blest was I then all bliss above!

Now, for that consecrated fount

Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,

What have I? shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden well.

A well of love—it may be deep—

I trust it is,—and never dry:

What matter? if the waters sleep

In silence and obscurity.

—Such change, and at the very door

Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Under the Moon

by William Butler Yeats

Sudden as I sat in a wood

An old grey man before me stood

And his eyes were burning with molten fire

And he touched the notes of a silver lyre.

- W. B. Yeats, "The Old Grey Man"

Thirty-eight early poems of William Butler Yeats from the 1880s and 1890s are included in this slim volume. They foreshadow the great poetry that would shower forth from his pen in the following century and are worth reading in that light. More than the poetry of the average young man, these poems suggest a depth of thought and feeling that is already present in the man. Moments of beauty and a sense of potential lie amidst the sometimes awkward prose, but who am I to contend that this is less than could be done by any genius of such an age? The innocence and naive charm of these poems makes them worthy of consideration.

Under the Moon: The Unpublished Early Poetry by William Butler Yeats. Scribners, New York. 1995

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Ernest Dowson

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

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 English poet Ernest Dowson was born on this day in 1867. The Poet and Author died penniless in an Absinthe haze, having created some of the best poetry of the decedent era. However his words are often not known as his own, lines such as "Gone With the Wind" which is better known as the name of a film, rather than a line from an outstanding poem.– they say he coined "Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder" – but he is regarded as one of the more talented of the turn-of-the-century Decadents. His friend Arthur Symons says he was "morbidly shy" and W. B. Yeats, another who knew him in the famous Rhymers' Club, described him as "a little melancholy."

Dowson attended The Queen's College, Oxford, but left before obtaining a degree. He led as active a social life as he could, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls, taking the performers to dinner, and so forth. At the same time he was working assiduously at his writing. He was a member of the Rhymers' Club, which included W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson. He was also a frequent contributor to the literary magazines The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Dowson collaborated on a couple of unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, was working on his own novel Madame de Viole, and was working as an unpaid reviewer for The Critic.

In 1889, at the age of twenty-three, Dowson fell in love with eleven-year-old Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurant owner. Adelaide is reputed to be the subject of one his best-known poems, Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae. He pursued her unsuccessfully; in 1897, she married a tailor who lodged above the restaurant, and Dowson was crushed. In August 1894, his father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895, and Dowson began to decline rapidly.

Robert Sherard one day found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford where he was himself living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard's cottage and died there of alcoholism at the age of 32. He is buried in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries.