Aesthetic and Decadent poetryDowson transforms Herrick's ingenuous carpe diem into a hedonistic
imperative that can only ruin the freshness of discovery and negate the
ultimate value of pleasure in an ephemeral universe. This point becomes
most salient in the final quatrain where the best that the world can offer -
"fruits and flowers" - is questioned. Traditionally, the closing couplet of a
villanelle aims to bind together the two lines that have been alternately
repeated in the previous stanzas. But as a number of critics have noted, in
Dowson's poem the last line returns to the opening tercet, implying that
"day" is "over long" because everything that has been said amounts to a
series of rhetorical embellishments and nothing more. 17 Dowson's negation
of the possibility of pleasure is consciously aware of the contrast between
himself and those Romantic and enthusiastic poets of the beginning of the
nineteenth century. So it seems appropriate that Symons termed Dowson a
"demoralised Keats." 18
Before Dowson started publishing and before "Decadence" was named
as such, the same experience that is resolved with artistic distance and the
resignation of awareness was cause for great tragedy. Amy Levy, who died
over a decade before Dowson's life came to an end, nevertheless is discussed
after him here because her poetry often takes this type of demoralization,
this idea that "day" is "over long," to its most bleak conclusion - suicide.
Her profound disillusionment with the world is even more complex then
Dowson's because she was female, lesbian, and Jewish, and therefore
located triply outside even the marginalized group of Decadent outsiders.
In particular, suicide is her most assertive poetic response to the perceived
gap between expectation and achievement. In "Epitaph (On a Common-
place Person who Died in Bed)" (1884), Levy offers this memorial to the
inherent futility of human endeavor:
He will never stretch out his hands in vain
Groping and groping - never again.
Never ask for bread, get a stone instead,
Never pretend that the stone is bread;
Nor sway and sway 'twixt the false and true,
Weighing and noting the long hours through.
Never ache and ache with the choked-up sighs;
This is the end of him, here he lies. (AL 9-16)Levy's "Epitaph" takes the logic of Dowson's villanelle to its terminal point
in reality. Even if "day" is "over long" in "Villanelle of the Poets' Road," it
remains possible to state that structure in a circular artistic pattern. But in
"Epitaph" the battle against a world of earthly rewards ("bread") and
absolute values ("false and true") has been given up once and for all.
This sentiment is partly visible even in the early poetry that Levy wrote