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Show captionCarol Rumens's poem of the week

Poem of the week: Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures by Ernest Dowson

A fin-de-siècle poet’s attempt to retain the beauty of a lost love is built around unsettlingly violent imagery

Carol Rumens

Mon 29 Aug 2022 05.00 EDT

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Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures

I took her dainty eyes, as well
As silken tendrils of her hair:
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her voice, a silver bell,
As clear as song, as soft as prayer;
I took her dainty eyes as well. 

It may be, said I, who can tell,
These things shall be my less despair?
And so I made a Villanelle! 

I took her whiteness virginal
And from her cheek two roses rare:
I took her dainty eyes as well. 

I said: “It may be possible
Her image from my heart to tear!”
And so I made a Villanelle. 

I stole her laugh, most musical:
I wrought it in with artful care;
I took her dainty eyes as well;
And so I made a Villanelle.

The English poet Ernest Dowson was born in Kent in 1867, and travelled, post-Oxford, to France, where the Decadent movement, an important influence on his work, was already established. In London, he was one of the members of the Rhymers’ Club, an informal gathering of poets including Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons and WB Yeats. He visited Ireland frequently, and formed a strong friendship with Oscar Wilde.

The Decadent movement took its dominant principle from aestheticism and the “art for art’s sake” credo. The movement additionally “symbolised the autonomy of art, the need for sensationalism and melodrama, egocentricity, the bizarre, the artificial”, according to the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory). Moral or political messaging was proscribed.

Dowson draws some of his influences from Latin poetry. “They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,” proclaims an anthology favourite, entitled, after Horace, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam (“The brevity of life forbids us to entertain hopes of long duration”). This week’s poem occupies the painful aftermath of hope; it sings in another key, using the tightly rhymed villanelle form. It seems closer to the Decadent core of risk and taboo-breaking.

The poem immediately declares a violent robbery. The treasures that are being “taken” belong to the woman’s body. The shock of the first refrain-line (the incomplete sentence, “I took her dainty eyes, as well …”) is constantly reinforced, and never seems mitigated by the repetition. In the form of a self-contained statement, it acquires even more force.

The third stanza seems to offer the clearest self-justification: the bodily treasures represent all the elements the lover most desired, and bringing them into a poem results in his “less despair”. It heralds a particularly radical theft in the fourth stanza, that of the virginal “whiteness” and the removal of the cheeks’ “two roses rare”. Yes, they have been re-positioned as poetic material but it’s difficult not to imagine a scene of violence, with a bleeding and finally bloodless victim.

Rebuking such over-literal interpretation, the performative second refrain-line reminds us that this is a poem talking about poem-making as a cure for pain: “And so I made a villanelle.” No physical savagery has been committed on a living person. That her “dainty eyes” have been “taken” suggests the Lady’s vision of the relationship has been imitated: the writer is re-focusing things from her perspective. The scale and pattern of the villanelle form might suggest some fine, miniature domestic art such as embroidery, also seen in the image of the “silken tendrils of her hair”. It seems unavoidable that the Lady’s vision is felt to be too “dainty” and too small. She has viewed the relationship with her lover as a game, as teasing and frustrating as the “hide-and-seek” versification of the villanelle.

So it’s an uncomfortable poem, and an unusually revealing statement of the body-snatching art in which all good writers have to engage. The form and metre are cleverly chosen, and at times the poem’s “audio” uncannily reproduces a light and playful female voice: “a silver bell / As clear as song, as soft as prayer”.