lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THENINETIES"have so lightly touched, and these are Ernest Dowson,Francis Thompson, and William Butler Yeats. OscarWilde's own quest of the exotic was satisfied in hisearly poems by an imitative enhancement of thedecorative, exotic element in the poetry of Tennyson,Keats, and the Pre-Raphaelites. He could followTennyson so closely as to write:O loved ones lying far away,What words of love can dead lips send !O wasted dust, O senseless clay !Is this the end ? Is this the end ?and imitate Arnold in a Requiescat. His discipleshipto Rossetti and to Whistler is obvious in:The Thames' nocturn of blue and goldChanged to a harmony of gray ;A barge with ochre-coloured hayDropt from the wharf.Even in the later and more justly admired, becausemore poignant, poems, The Harlot's House and thelast of the sophisticated ballads of which Coleridge'sis the first, one suspects or detects the influence ofDowson in the one and of Housman in the other, butReading Jail, cleared of some of its arabesques andcheap cynicism, is an arresting poem, with some versesnot easily forgotten.The final and the most poignant note of a poetrywhich is the expression or record of such a break withthe prejudices of society or the conditions of life isthat of self-pity. It is the dominant note in Wilde'sballad and in most of the few poems of Dowson. Ithas been said, and with some justice, that he did notwrite poems so much as a few delightful refrains onone or two recurrent themes—love and desire and "the143