The dream grew vague, I moulded with my hands The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist I touched; and pigments reverently placed Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains, Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes, And gems whose hot harsh names are never said I was a masseur; and my fingers bled With wonder as I touched their awful limbs.
Suddenly, in the marble trough there seems O, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness! A twylipped scarlet pansie. My caress Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet, Adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat Of treatment once heard in a hospital For plagues that fascinate, but half appal.
So, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold; Thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold; Thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth; The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth; And on the belly, pallid blushes crept, That maddened me, until I laughed and wept.
Here we have a long amorous catalogue. It is the catalogue age which comes via Oscar Wilde’s _Sphinx_ and _Salomé_ from certain French writers. But this does not make up for the singing power of the poet, and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the period, Dowson and Davidson.
Indeed, there is no one in the nineties worthier of the honourable title of poet than Ernest Dowson. With his unsatisfied passion for Adelaide in Soho; his cry for ‘madder music and for stronger wine’; his æsthetic theories, such as that the letter ‘v’ was the most beautiful of the letters; his reverence for things French, he has caused Mr. Symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful portrait of a true _enfant de Bohême_. Robert Harborough Sherard has also kept the Dowson tradition up in his description of the death of the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his _Twenty Years in Paris_, a work which contains much interesting material for a study of the nineties. But Victor Plarr, another poet of the nineties, enraged at the incompleteness of these pictures, has tried to give us in his reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia, the other facet of Dowson--the _poète intime_ known to few.