Victorian Poetry

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT

Are sad that they will not stay;

Yet is day over long.

Fruits and flowers among,

What is better than they:

Wine and woman and song?

Yet is day over long. (ED rro)

Consciously revising a number of conventional tropes, Dowson's poem
opens by giving a new twist to a much-used metaphor: the road of life.
Although a road traditionally suggests linear progression, here it spirals
around the cyclical form of the villanelle. Originating in sixteenth-century
France, this particular genre was revived by Swinburne because of its
obsessive repetitiousness. Consisting of nineteen lines (five tercets followed
by a concluding quatrain), it derives its circularity from two related
features: it uses two rhymes only; and it repeats its first and third lines in
alternate stanzas. But its circularity does not make for static repetition.
Lines i, 6, 12, and 18, which delineate the pleasures of life, contrast with
lines 3, 9, 15, and 19, which emphasize the insufficiency of these pleasures.

Thus the two likely purposes in life - pleasure and progress - cancel out
each other, leaving the poetic voice in a state of frustrated weariness (like
"passion" and "fashion" in "Cynara"). The first line, recalling FitzGerald's
Rubdiydt, presents the favored nineteenth-century version of carpe diem.
Yet the second line runs against the initial enthusiasm since "Wine and
woman and song" are only "garnish." What is more, "Wine and woman
and song" follow each other grammatically with neither subordination nor
qualification. Where FitzGerald's rhyme scheme accentuates the pronoun
"Thou" (making the "Book of Verse," the "Flask of Wine," and the "Loaf
of Bread" lesser accompaniments to Omar Khayyam's lover), Dowson
sandwiches the loved object between two equally significant nouns, linking
all of them through the relativizing conjunction "and." Like the late-
twentieth-century slogan "sex and drugs and rock and roll," the parataxis
of "wine and woman and song" forms no hierarchy that can elevate any of
the senses; it simply flattens them out. With no attainable goal in sight,
therefore, the speaker must confront the difficulty of the burden of pleasure
along the poets' "way."

The cyclical form of Dowson's poems suggests that once sensual plea-
sures have been experienced, they can only be numbingly repeated. This
feature is evident in the phrase "gather them while we may," which recalls -
only to contrast with - Robert Herrick's renowned (and, indeed, far more
innocent) seventeenth-century enjoinder in his lyric "To the Virgins, to
Make Much of Time" (1648): "Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may." 16

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