Ernest Dowson and the strategies of decadent desire

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Karen Alkalay-Gut

The repeated line with which "Flos Lunae" concludes takes on at the end a new power. Not only is it the result of the potency achieved by the image of wholeness, but it sustains and holds the verses and ideas together, provides a frame where it would otherwise be lost. Like love, the poem is held together by the desire not to decline from the intensity of revelation. But the most important point here is the outright abdication of fulfillment or peace for the sake of the tension. Desire is a poetic goal. Rather than giving up the possibility of success with a sigh, Dowson uses the carpe diem theme quite consciously to subvert it, to deny its appropriateness and the purity of artistic intent.(42)

This conscious, technical craftsmanship of intensity of passion has been observed, albeit tangentially, in the only poem to date of Dowson's to warrant concentrated attention, "Cynara,"(43) but the emphasis still needs to be repositioned. It is the flux of the situation that attracts and not the situation itself, which is, of course, indicative of a more general condition. For example, the phrase, "the heart of thee" (and not "thy heart"), suggesting the core of her being as well as her love, indicates the possibility that no center, no core exists. The female object here becomes identified with eyes, with an opaque surface, rather than with a potential depth. This is not a gender misunderstanding. Dowson criticizes the limitations of Olive Shreiner's sexism on this very subject. "Men," says Olive Shreiner, "are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it--but there is." "And the reverse instance is as ture," follows Dowson's comment in the margin--"only women don't believe we have another side than the obvious one, even when we show it."(44) As Barbara Charlesworth and others have pointed out, it is one of the basic premises of decadence "that nothing outside the mind has any meaning save that given it by the mind. Every one creates for himself a reality which [is] personal, incommunicable, and imprisoning. However, each individual has sensory experience as a means of escape to the world outside the mind."(45)

Sensory experience may work for other poets of this period, but not for Dowson. A comparison of this poem with one by Arthur Symons makes the difference apparent. Entitled "Idealism," and beginning with the line, "I know the woman has no soul," Symons's poem would seem initially parallel to Dowson's. But Symons continues:

I know The Woman has no possibilities Of soul or mind or heart, but merely is The masterpiece of flesh; well, be it so. It is her flesh that I adore!(46)

Dowson's concern in "Flos Lunae" is not separating the woman's soul from her body, but joining them, in making his own isolation as apparent as it is real. Dowson's desire (what Lacan calls "the metonymy of the want-to-be," manque a etre"),(47) then, is to maintain this desire of being, to feel existence and art by feeling the hunger for an impossible ideal, for, in Oscar Wilde's phrase, what "are not and ... should be."(48)