He Would so Alter Thy Cold Eyes

[scrypt]

The longer I consider it, the likelier it seems that Ernest Dowson would have altered Adelaide Foltinowicz’s cold eyes: He would have made them less cold when they looked at him. Yes, he wanted to punish himself for being an addict. Yes, he held fast to the grid of a sterile iconography to keep himself from falling. Yes, his artistic method was one that, in Yeats’s words, tore pieces out of him; his work gained strength by draining his own; his goal was to be sacrificed to its perfection.

Even so, it’s clear he wanted Adelaide to accept him. To embrace him, even if empathy, plausibility and his own self-hatred made that prospect so remote that he had to litanize the alternative: To satisfy himself with the close proximity of her disinterest.

Yet if she’d responded and he’d been able to bring himself to seduce her, he’d have exterminated whatever remained of her innocence, since she was still an adolescent and he twelve years her senior. If like Poe or Jerry Lee Lewis, he’d been able to acquire his “child bride,” perhaps he’d even have beaten her, since he was purported to be as abusive when drunk as gentle when sober.

And so he whored, drank absinthe and wrote poetry that embraced her absence. He stayed faithful to Adelaide’s – Cynara’s – distance in his fashion.

* * * *

Perhaps the role of the dominatrix arose from some self-absorbed devotee's misread of a woman's rejection as virtue and his love as a sin to be punished. Perhaps he told himself he protected her by encouraging her to reject him.

Or perhaps he was self-aware and did protect her.

[Mr. D.]

Which Yeats, William B. or Jack B?

[scrypt]

It's a paraphrase of a quote from The Trembling of the Veil. As good as Jack Yeats was, people tend to mention his first name when they quote him; not so in the case of W.B.

[Mr. D.]

Thanks. I know a little about Dowson but I certainly could know a whole lot more about him. I always learn a lot by reading the posts on TLO. Another good writer to read!

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[teguififthzeal]

Ernest Dowson was as "decadent" as they come, almost in that stereotypical literary sense. Verlaine saw himself as a Christian with lapses (only the lapses were constant and almost daily); Rimbaud knew he was mostly a cold hearted prick; Baudelaire was a self hating good man at heart. Dowson was the most agonized of them all and the darkest, if not as important lyrically as the above. He fits exquisitely into Nietzsche's image of "the decadent". His adoration of children was seldom talked about by his contemporaries because people rarely know what to say about that. Unfortunately, there seems to be a surplus of poets with that tendency and history continues to unearth it.