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.