THE POEMS AND PROSE OF ERNEST DOWSON ***
E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE POEMS AND PROSE
OF
ERNEST DOWSON
with a MEMOIR by ARTHUR SYMONS
CONTENTS
MEMOIR. By Arthur Symons
POEMS
IN PREFACE: FOR ADELAIDE
A CORONAL
VERSES:
Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration Villanelle of Sunset My Lady April To One in Bedlam Ad Domnulam Suam Amor Umbratilis Amor Profanus Villanelle of Marguerites Yvonne of Brittany Benedictio Domini Growth Ad Manus Puellae Flos Lunae Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae Vanitas Exile Spleen O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis "You would have understood me, had you waited" April Love Vain Hope Vain Resolves A Requiem Beata Solitudo Terre Promise Autumnal In Tempore Senectutis Villanelle of his Lady's Treasures Gray Nights Vesperal The Garden of Shadow Soli cantare periti Arcades On the Birth of a Friend's Child Extreme Unction Amantium Irae Impenitentia Ultima A Valediction Sapientia Lunae "Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad" Seraphita Epigram Quid non speremus, Amantes? Chanson sans Paroles
THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE
DECORATIONS:
Beyond De Amore The Dead Child Carthusians The Three Witches Villanelle of the Poet's Road Villanelle of Acheron Saint Germain-en-Laye After Paul Verlaine-I After Paul Verlaine-II After Paul Verlaine-III After Paul Verlaine-IV To his Mistress Jadis In a Breton Cemetery To William Theodore Peters on his Renaissance Cloak The Sea-Change Dregs A Song Breton Afternoon Venite Descendamus Transition Exchanges To a Lady asking Foolish Questions Rondeau Moritura Libera Me To a Lost Love Wisdom In Spring A Last Word
PROSE
THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN A CASE OF CONSCIENCE AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS
ERNEST DOWSON was born in 1867 at Lea, in Kent, England. Most of his life was spent in France. He died February 21, 1900.
The poems in this volume were published at varying intervals from his Oxford days at Queens College to the time of his death. The prose works here included were published in 1886, 1890, 1892 and in 1893.
ERNEST DOWSON
I
The death of Ernest Dowson will mean very little to the world at large, but it will mean a great deal to the few people who care passionately for poetry. A little book of verses, the manuscript of another, a one-act play in verse, a few short stories, two novels written in collaboration, some translations from the French, done for money; that is all that was left by a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but a poet, one of the very few writers of our generation to whom that name can be applied in its most intimate sense. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation, where in truth there is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius.
