Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

same futile energy as a dog that I once saw standing in an Irish stream, and

snapping at the bubbles that ran continually past him on the water. Life ran

past me continually, and I tried to make all its bubbles my own. (AS V, 32)

This passage makes it clear that observation is a necessary yet taxing
activity for the Decadent poet. Since this type of writer no longer possesses
a clearly defined hierarchy of values, everything before him ("This garret,"
"This bed of straw," "This worn-out body," and so forth) holds equal
worth. Consequently, the amount of data to be processed and set in order
can prove exhausting - artistically, morally, physically, and spiritually.
Symons, then, faced a contradiction. He knew that there were so many
things to be experienced and yet so few guidelines to make sense of those
experiences that the imperative to capture (so to speak) the "bubbles" in a
poem was ultimately doomed to failure. It is no wonder that love, perhaps
more than anything else, is destined for ruin, as the neurotic sonnet
"Nerves" (1897) reveals:

The modern malady of love is nerves.

Love, once a simple madness, now observes

The stages of his passionate disease,

And is twice sorrowful because he sees

Inch by inch entering, the fatal knife.

O health of simple minds, give me your life,

And let me, for one midnight, cease to hear

The clock for ever ticking in my ear,

The clock that tells the minutes in my brain.

It is not love, nor love's despair, this pain

That shoots a witless, keener pang across

The simple agony of love and loss.

Nerves, nerves! O folly of a child who dreams

Of heaven, and, waking in the darkness, screams. (AS I, 228)

In formal terms, this appears a fairly traditional poem. Appropriately
enough, the conventional topic of love takes shape in the Shakespearean
sonnet that devotes one quatrain to spatial and another to temporal
concerns. But as each line unfolds, the poetic voice reveals that the kind of
amatory "madness" that Shakespeare celebrated is now literally "diseased."
Part of love's "malady" results from the relentless passing of time that does
not lead toward any goal, judgment, or satisfaction. Every experience,
therefore, undergoes a dulling repetition, resulting in feelings of disappoint-
ment, incompleteness, and loss. Unlike Dowson, however, Symons's lack of
fulfillment ends not in weariness but terror. The final line refers to a well-
known phrase from Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) where Tennyson
wishes to believe in a divinely ordered universe but remains confused and

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