This week’s choice is necessarily short as I have been suffering from a hideous gastric upset all week and haven’t had the time to devote to a long poem. It is “Vitae Summa Brevis” by Ernest Dowson.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Ernest Dowson (1867—1900)
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Poem 264. Vitae Summa Brevis (The Brief Sum of Life)
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Dowson’s brief poem muses on the brevity of human existence and suggests that the human emotions of sorrow and mirth, “Love and desire and hate” are part of life and do not follow us after death—“after we pass the gate”.
He memorably describes the hedonism of youth as “the days of wine and roses”—a phrase which has been used for the title of a 1962 film and a song from the film—and describes life as a path emerging briefly from the mists before it “closes within a dream”.
I like the poem because of its imagery, because it makes me think of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld where when people die, according to Death in the book Mort, “EMOTIONS GET LEFT BEHIND, IT’S ALL A MATTER OF GLANDS” and also reminds me of the quote from the Venerable Bede:
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
St. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Dowson’s longer poem “Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” (which I covered in June 2020) provided the title for the book and film “Gone with the Wind”.
Links
- Read some more facts about Ernest Dowson at Interesting Literature.
- Watch WisdoMango’s performance on YouTube.