 | | What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
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| | That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
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Unlike Housman, whose pastoral verse does not follow classical models in depicting shepherds and shepherdesses at leisure, Dowson employs a title from Virgil's tenth eclogue to suggest the source of his inspiration in "Soli cantare periti Arcades" ("Arcadians, alone gifted to sing"). The familiar landscape includes a vision of rustics "piping a frolic measure" and delineates the traditional contrast of town and country"For the town is black and weary, / And I hate the London street." The speaker "will live in a dairy, / And its Colin I will be.'' Many of Dowson's pastoral poems, however, depict autumn, the approaching winter heralding the inevitability of oblivion. In "Autumnal" the love relationship is envisioned as "a twilight of the heart" briefly eluding time, but then the speaker muses: "Are we not better and at home / In dreamful Autumn, we who deem / No harvest joy is worth a dream?" Winter and night lie beyond the "pearled horizons," providing only a brief respite "Until love turn from us and die / Beneath the drear November trees." In "Amor Profanus" the speaker, invoking the traditional carpe diem theme, urges: "while life is ours, / Hoard not thy beauty rose and white, / But pluck the pretty, fleeting flowers." Far too soon, he laments, "we twain shall tread / The bitter pastures of the dead."
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The Revolt of Aestheticism
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In his 1862 review of Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal
Swinburne argued that "a poet's business is presumably to write good verse, and by no means to redeem the age and remould society"in short, he echoed what Théophile Gautier had publicized in his preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin
(1835) as
l'art pour l'art
(art for art's sake). In
William Blake
(1866) Swinburne developed this view of poetry, suggestions of which had been voiced by Keats and Coleridge: "Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way become. . . . Her business is not to do good on other grounds, but to be
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