Today’s Poem: Vitae Summa Brevis

They are not long, the days of wine and roses

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, La Mélancolie, 1785 (Wikimedia Commons)

Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) was part of the artistic coterie known as the Decadents. Think Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, Aubrey Beardsley, and all the rest of the late-Victorian British artists who thought the French followers of Baudelaire had basically gotten it right: Bottles of absinthe and the life of a poète maudit are the only escape from the suffocation of 19th-century bourgeois life.

There is this difference, however: Unlike some of the others, Dowson didn’t limit his decadence to his art. He lived an entire life of strangeness that ended with his early death, after his conversion to the counter-culture of Catholicism. A graduate of Oxford, he returned home to work at the family business in Limehouse — while pouring out poems, notes, and translations for the Yellow Book and other literary magazines. The death of his father from a chloral-hydrate overdose in 1894 and his mother from hanging herself in 1895 (b…