Today’s Poem: Vitae Summa Brevis
They are not long, the days of wine and roses
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 (both had tuberculosis) left him adrift, and he systematically drank himself to the ruined health that would kill him at age 32.
In the 1896 “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” Dowson takes his title from Horace’s Odes, I.4, which he renders as “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long.” Only two quatrains long — each with lines of 5, 3, 5, and 2 feet, rhymed abab, the truncated b lines accentuating the mood of sad brevity — the poem contains the occasionally quoted phrase “Days of wine and roses.” Dowson was a coiner of phrases that stick in the memory of readers — and the minds of novelists seeking a book title: “gone with the wind,” “I have been faithful . . . in my fashion,” “madder music and . . . stronger wine.”
But most influential in the slim work of Ernest Dowson has been his poetry’s deep sense of the tears of things: the faint but all-infusing sadness of the world.
Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam
by Ernest Dowson
The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long — Horace
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.
How beautifully sad.
How marvelously succinct.
It almost makes the pain oblique.