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A Last Word

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“A Last Word” Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867-1900)

Published in 1899, Decorations: in Verse and Prose

Dowson was part of the Decadent Movement. This movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness of this world, skepticism, uncertainty, symbolism, and a kind of Victorian grotesqueness. Some other writers in England involved in Decadentism were Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and Lionel Johnson.

“A Last Word” is a mournful poem. The piece was probably written during the author’s last days and published a few months before he died. The title may tell us something. The man in this poem is about to face his death. The poem points out some complicated features in the modern age: exile and the loss of faith. It might have later inspired the creation of an important work, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

A Last Word

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand; [1]

The day is overworn, the birds all flown;

And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;

Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,

Broods like an owl; we cannot understand

Laughter or tears, for we have only known

Surpassing vanity: vain things alone

Have driven our perverse and aimless band. [2]


Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold, [3]

To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust

Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,

Freedom to all from love and fear and lust. [4]

Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold

Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

 

Footnotes:

[1] The opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-jalfred-prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
    When the evening is spread out against the sky….

Both poems speak of the “us.” It seems in this poem they (perhaps two miserable guys) are going to the Hollow Lands. In Eliot’s poem, the characters seem to be in Hell, because it quotes a passage from Dante’s Inferno.

[2] Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

[3] Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:....

The two poems share a very similar sentiment.
 
[4] 1 John 4:18.