Something slightly different this time.
Yes, this post does include an original poem, but it will be a better read with a little explanation first .
My poem is a response to a poem written by Ernest Dowson. He chose an odd title in Latin, so his poem is generally known as ‘Cynara’. It’s probably his best-remembered poem, and several phrases also live on in film and song titles. Ernest is identified with the British Decadent movement of the 1890s, but his education was very uneven and he was no intellectual. He simply wrote poems that expressed his feelings about life; and since his brief adult life was very sad, his poems mostly range in tone from melancholy to despair.
He has, however, been badly misunderstood and misrepresented, and is now frequently seen as a moral degenerate. This began when Arthur Simons, a contemporary, wrote a priggish and factually incorrect obituary. The injustice is still being done. Alex Murray, an academic brought in to contribute to a BBC In Our Time discussion (BBC Channel 4, 18th November 2021), bizarrely describes the Cynara poem (often assumed to be autobiographical) as a picture of the “exhausted eroticism” of someone “who can no longer be aroused” because they have had “too much sex, too many boozy nights”.
Anyone who reads the poem with a little care (clearly more than Murray bothered to do) will realise that’s entirely untrue. It’s a simple tale of unrequited love. A man (the speaker in the poem) has been rejected by the woman he loves, Cynara. He finds a kind of comfort in the bed of another woman, but then feels ashamed by the sense that he is being unfaithful to Cynara – though without reason, as they have no relationship. In essence it’s a case of someone ‘on the rebound’ falling into a stranger’s bed and then regretting it. Plenty of people have done it, and many more will.
There is a difference here, it has to be admitted. The stranger is a prostitute. That does rather take the shine off the moral standing of the speaker but it was hardly a terrible sin, nor a crime. I reckon that if you were a Victorian sex worker, you’d welcome Ernest as one of your nicer customers. He was kind and thoughtful, and not at all snobbish. His personal hygiene was rather iffy, but perhaps she got him to wash first.
The aspect of the poem that saddens me is the way it disregards this prostitute. The speaker spends almost the whole poem talking to Cynara, while the woman who lies beside him doesn’t even have a name. She’s more poetic device than real person.So I thought I’d even things up, and write a poem from her point of view. Here, first, is Ernest Dowson’s poem, followed by my mine.
‘Cynara’* by Ernest Dowson
(Note: I have merely reproduced this poem.)
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Cynara’s substitute* by Steve Dowson
He came in absinthe and in darkness wreathed, and paid
To buy my scarlet painted lips another night,
His money on my bedside table carefully laid.
These are the stains that sully love’s expression.
He called Cynara! at his passion’s height.
His eyes are blinded by his misplaced heart’s obsession.
We lay entwined, as if to mimic love’s embrace.
I felt his tears of grief upon my shoulder fall,
But he knew not the ones that lay upon my face.
These are the stains that sully love’s expression.
Where male lust reigns, a woman’s truth would pall.
His eyes are blinded by his misplaced heart’s obsession.
The revellers homeward go, to share another day –
Their taunting laughter echoing in the darkened lane –
While he, as is his custom, at dawn will slip away.
These are the stains that sully love’s expression.
His farewell kiss a coin, a keepsake of disdain.
His eyes are blinded by his misplaced heart’s obsession.
He craves the smooth-skinned fruit that clings high on the tree.
Though he has tasted fallen fruit and knows it’s sweet,
Here lain, the blemishes are all that he can see.
These are the stains that sully love’s expression.
Look down, my love, I am waiting at thy feet!
His eyes are blinded by his misplaced heart’s obsession.
| *The title Ernest gave to his poem was Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, a quote from the Roman author Terence that translates as ‘I am not as I was in the reign of good Cynara’. It’s difficult to know how this adds to, or explains, his poem – other than to provide the name Cynara. Slightly tongue in cheek, I’d like to match him by giving my poem a title taken from the Heroides, by the Latin author Ovid, which were also attempts by a man to imagine the thoughts of hard-done-by women. In particular, I’d reference Heroides 3, where Briseis – a young woman who was passed between the Greeks at Troy like a trophy- berates Achilles for not rescuing her. She says, “If it is right to complain, my lover and lord, I complain.” |
Steve Dowson 
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