"A Last Word" (A Poem)

The Late-Victorian poet and novelist Ernest Dowson is little known today outside of serious literary circles. In fact, Dowson's undistinguished career is just one of the many elements of his tragic life. He lost both of his parents to tuberculosis, failed to win the hand of his love, uncompleted his degree at Queen’s College in Oxford, struggled to find a major audience for his writing, and passed away a penniless alcoholic at the age of thirty-two.[1] As a child of the Decadent Movement, which originated in France and championed artificiality and excess, the writer, like many of his decadent peers, articulated the dark mood of the late nineteenth century in the sober tones of his work, including “A Last Word.”[2] Unlike his literary counterparts, Dowson, as Oscar Wilde laments, used the stark misfortune of his own life to fuel the sad undertones of his works’ bleak messages.[3]

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.[4]

Works Referenced

Adams, Jad. Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002.

Dowson, Ernest. “A Last Word.” The Poems of Ernest Dowson. London: Ballantyne, Hanson and Company, 1905. 166.

Shrimpton, Nicholas. “Later Victorian Voices I: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Houseman.” The Cambridge History of English Poetry. Ed. Michael O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 686-705.
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[1] Adams, xi-x.
[2] Shrimpton, 687-689.
[3] Adams, 105.
[4] Dowson, 166.