e someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch
in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one
humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward,
something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak
with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility,
or lack of power to be responsible.

He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the
old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain
requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In
the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear,
though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his
buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it
was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He
was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was
bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no
Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten
him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet
of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His
neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of
absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable
Cafe d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the
very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.

Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so
singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air,
even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried
and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and
they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important
things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the
vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound,
excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all
struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he
clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out
of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a
strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of
Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.

He help