I Have Been Faithful to Thee. . . in my fashion.. Two LOST POEMS

LITERATURE REVIEW

The Stolen Kiss

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1787-1789

(The Hermitage, St. Petersburg)

I used to spend hours at a time as a girl in my bed luxuriating in poetry books like a long lazy boat ride, especially when I was sick, woozily lost in a world I have missed for a long time.


I never knew whether the poet I was reading was famous or "lost" or altogether terrible, so I formed my own mind and favorites.


It turns out my natural taste was pretty true to canon. Two I am thinking of now, however, are genuinely "lost," or at least two of their poems are; once beloved and now virtually unknown.


And yet, one of them coined two spectacularly famous phrases that all of us still know- and use! I guarantee that at some time, you have used them both.

 chaste obsession, the Muse
Photo by Joanna Thomas, flckr

The young Ernest Dowson- who was to remain forever young (1867-1900)- was a Decadence movement poet who hobnobbed with the likes of Yeats, and presumably addressed his poetry to an 11-year-old waitress at the restaurant he frequented. 


Oscar Wilde's biographer discovered him in a bar dying of absinthe, to which he was addicted, and took him home to mend but, age 32, Dowson never recovered.


Dowson has two phrases we've eternalized- and yet few know his name. His work is full of phrases begging to be eternalized. The poem he is known for (if at all), remains one of my favorites** that I find truly delightful (if decadence can be delightful)- and full of quotable phrases.

Dowson is a poet lost but not forgotten. His name is what's lost. This poem might appear on any list of lost poems. I discovered this terrific literary article that analyzes that poem.* Here we learn of Dowson's skill as a French translator of Verlaine- from whom he borrowed the 12-syllable French line called the Alexandrine, to powerful effect.

Here are Dowson's two phrases that I promise you, YOU HAVE USED: