Guardian Poem of the week: Non sum qualis
eram bonae sub regno Cynarae by Ernest
Dowson
A yearning for a past love ebbs and flows dreamily under the influence of the 12-syllable
French line
Flowering obsession ... Dowson's Cynara – which comes from the Greek word for artichoke –
represents a lost love. Photograph: Andrew Mccaul/Getty Images
Carol Rumens
Monday 14 March 2011 11.48 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 23 December 2015
According to his friend and fellow Rhymer, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson's favourite line
of poetry was Poe's, "The viol, the violet and the vine." If so, perhaps Dowson was not
merely attracted by the scent of the symbolism, but had recognised one of his own qualities in
the American writer – that ability to melt down the staccato language, English, till it flowed
like a Romance language.
The French influence was enabling. Dowson had been educated in France, and he was a
translator of Verlaine. This week's poem, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae",
owes some of its dreamy music to the 12-syllable French line, the Alexandrine, which
dominates the beginning of each stanza, and carries the poem's story, such as it is.
The title, from Horace's Odes, Book 4, 1, translates as "I am not as I was in the reign of good
Cinara." In Horace's poem, the speaker implores Venus to wage no further erotic wars on
him. He is advanced in years, he says, and she should bother some younger man, better
endowed for love. But there is a fascinating turn at the end, when the speaker declares, in
tears, the presence of a new and unattainable erotic attraction, a young man called Ligurinus.
Cinara is unimportant in Horace's poem. Her name merely provides the impulse for his
recusatio, his rebuttal, of Venus's powers. She symbolises the attachment her former lover no
longer claims – or pretends no longer to claim, since he now loves someone new.
Dowson's Cynara represents the lost love who has become a constant obsession. The image
the poet briefly draws of her is rather pre-Raphaelite, her "pale, lost lilies" contrasting with
the prostitute's "bought red mouth" and the flung roses of dissipation. The diction is archaic:
("yesternight", "betwixt", "yea") but the scenes could not be more fin de siècle, more
knowingly decadent. And yet the impression is of pure unfeigned emotion.
In the poem's most famous line, "I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind," the
subject of "gone with the wind" appears to be "I", not Cynara. This stanza reveals the lover's
frantic onward movement, his dance of death. That Cynara is ever-present, in spite of
everything, is all the poem wants to say, the whole of its simple story. Getting to the refrain is
what matters, riding the delirious emotional sweep from "passion" to "fashion", obsessively
re-igniting the old flame. The tense shifts to present in the final stanza: "then falls thy
shadow, Cynara", "And I am desolate" (my italics), evoking the live current of the
compulsion. "Sick" is not a poeticism, under the circumstances: this love is near to disease.
And perhaps, had the poem been a stanza longer, we might have got sick of the old passion,
too. As it is, Dowson stops well before his reader can start yawning. He has found not only
the right form but the right length for this slight but emotionally overwhelming story.
His art is not all music and movement; there is a cleverly choreographed stillness as well. An
exclamation mark after each address to Cynara creates a perfectly natural-seeming caesura.
But it is an unusually forceful one, visual as well as aural. The pause extends for an extra
half-beat, and adds emphasis to the name. In the body of the poem it is always "Cynara!",
never simply "Cynara".
How relevant is Horace's poem to Dowson's? Of course, the Latin tag is eloquent and
melodious, and the source of an attractive-sounding name for the lost beloved, even if
"cynara" means "artichoke" in Greek. When, however, Dowson works the same trick in "Vita
summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam" ("The brevity of life forbids us to entertain a
distant hope," Odes, 1.4) the tag seems rather more relevant. "They are not long, the weeping
and the laughter," Dowson's poem begins, and while it's hardly a translation, it seems not
unrelated to Horace's own tracing of the passage of time. In "Non sum qualis …" the Latin
seed has produced an altogether stranger flower. The emotions that Horace attaches to
Ligurinus, Dowson attaches to Cynara. He yearns for a woman from the past, Horace for a
new boy. But it's probably all one to Venus.