Dowson’s Dreamful Autumn
Summer’s loss seems little…on days like these.
In October 1892, Ernest Dowson wrote to his friend Victor Plarr1 to say:
“My muse awoke from her torpor of many months yesterday, here is her feeble utterance, but she may run to another verse by and by.”
The utterance to which Dowson refers were three stanzas he appended in the letter2 about the sweetness of the prevailing season—which he describes as a place “Where shadow and the darkness meet.”
His hope was for Autumn to be a hazy respite between the silhouette of Summer and the early twilight of Winter; but Dowson’s shady metaphor betrays the persistence of his melancholy, particularly in regard to an unrequited life. It was a dusk that would never lead to dawn—and as he suggested in the letter, he later added an inevitable final verse about the death of love.3
The full poem was printed in Verses (1896)4 where it was given the name Autumnal as follows:
PALE amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these!
Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time’s deceit.
Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.
Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.
Dowson died at the age of 32 in 1900 of tuberculosis, an affliction that had also plagued his tragic parents.
During his exile in France, Oscar Wilde spent many pleasant hours with Dowson, and wrote to their co-publisher Leonard Smithers about the death of his friend: “Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb, and rue and myrtle too, for he knew what love is. He was a sweet singer, with a note all the lovelier because it reminds us of how thrushes sang in Shakespeare’s day. If he is not yet laid to rest or unrest, do put some flowers for me on his grave.”5
It was a bereavement short-lived. Wilde himself died in the late Autumn of that same year.
© John Cooper, 2025.
Oscar Wilde to Ernest Dowson:
“There is a fatality about our being together that is astounding...
(Complete Letters, 901)
Footnotes:
Victor Gustave Plarr (1863–1929). English poet born in France. Founding member of the Rhymers’ Club.
Flower, Desmond and Henry Maas, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1967). 243-4.
In the letter Dowson titles the three verses In Autumn.Dowson wrote to Arthur Moore on May 26, 1889:
I am more than ever convinced of the futility of bringing any kind of sentiment into one’s relations with Woman. The whole idea is essentially false & impossible. (Letters, p. 81).Dowson, Ernest, Verses, Leonard Smithers, London, (1896).
Complete Letters, 1173.
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The definitive study of Wilde’s relationship to dress and a unique collection of Victorian dress theory.