Poem of the Day: ‘Vitae Summa Brevis’

Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) was part of the Decadent movement — Wilde, Swinburne, Beardsley, and all the rest of the late-Victorian British artists who thought the French followers of Baudelaire had basically gotten it right: Bottles of absinthe and the life of a poète maudit are the only escape from the suffocation of 19th-century bourgeois life. There is this difference, however: Unlike some of the others, Dowson didn’t limit his decadence to his art. He lived an entire life of strangeness that ended with his early death, after his conversion to the counter-culture of Catholicism. For his birthday on August 2, the Sun offers, as its Poem of the Day, Dowson’s best known poem, “Vitae Summa Brevis.” The title taken from a line of Horace (“The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”), the poem contains two stanzas of lines with 5, 3, 5, and 2 feet, rhymed abab. “Days of wine and roses” would prove the best known phrase from the poem, and Dowson was a coiner of phrases — “gone with the wind,” “I have been faithful . . . in my fashion” — used by other artists as titles of their own works. But most influential has been his poetry’s sense of the faint sadness of the world.Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longamby Ernest DowsonThey are not long, the weeping and the laughter,Love and desire and hate:I think they have no portion in us afterWe pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for a while, then closesWithin a dream.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Vitae Summa Brevis’

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