You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Ernest Dowson's poem — usually known by its refrain "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion" — is one of the defining texts of the 1890s Decadent movement. It is a poem about obsessive, inescapable love; about the failure of pleasure to distract from longing; and about a self-destructiveness that the speaker understands perfectly but cannot resist. It is also, in its musicality and emotional intensity, one of the most technically accomplished poems in the Pre-1900 anthology.
Dowson's life reads like a Decadent parable. Born into a middle-class family that owned a dry dock in Limehouse, East London, he was educated at Queen's College, Oxford (which he left without a degree) and became a fixture of the 1890s London literary scene, associated with the Rhymers' Club (whose members included W.B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons). He fell obsessively in love with Adelaide Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurant owner in Soho, who was eleven years old when they first met. He proposed to her repeatedly; she eventually married a tailor's assistant. Dowson's parents both committed suicide within months of each other in 1894–95. He converted to Roman Catholicism, drank heavily, contracted tuberculosis, and died in poverty at the age of thirty-two.
AO3 — Context: The Decadent movement of the 1880s and 1890s — influenced by French poets including Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé — rejected Victorian morality, bourgeois respectability, and the idea that art should serve a social or moral purpose. The movement embraced aestheticism ("art for art's sake"), sensual experience, artifice, and the exploration of extreme emotional states. Oscar Wilde was its most famous representative; the trial and imprisonment of Wilde in 1895 effectively destroyed the movement as a public force.
The Latin title — "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae" — is from Horace's Odes (IV.i.3–4): "I am not what I was under the reign of the good Cynara." In Horace's poem, the ageing speaker tells Venus that he is no longer capable of love as he once experienced it. Dowson borrows the sense of loss and diminishment but intensifies it: his speaker is not old but young, and his inability to recapture love's intensity is not a natural fading but a torment.
"Cynara" (from the Greek kynara, artichoke — a plant associated with bitterness) becomes the name of the absent, idealised beloved. The classical allusion elevates the poem beyond personal confession into a tradition stretching back two thousand years, suggesting that the experience of lost love is universal.
The poem consists of four stanzas of six lines each, with a complex rhyme scheme (ABABCC, with variations) and a refrain that closes each stanza:
"I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."
The refrain is the poem's emotional anchor. Its repetition across four stanzas — each describing a different attempt to forget Cynara — creates a structure of failed escape: no matter what the speaker does, he returns to the same declaration of paradoxical fidelity.
The metre is predominantly alexandrine (twelve-syllable lines), which gives the verse a long, flowing, incantatory quality. The longer lines create a sense of languor and exhaustion — the rhythm itself feels like a speaker who cannot stop talking, who is driven to confess.
"Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine / There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed / Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; / And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, / Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: / I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."
The opening places the speaker in bed with another woman ("betwixt her lips and mine"). But Cynara's "shadow" falls between them — the memory of the absent beloved intrudes on the physical act. "Thy breath was shed / Upon my soul" is extraordinarily intimate: Cynara is not physically present, but her breath (spirit, essence) touches the speaker's soul even as another woman touches his body. "Desolate and sick of an old passion" — "sick of" means both "made ill by" and "exhausted by." The passion is "old" — not new and fresh but chronic, like a disease.
The repetition "I was desolate" and the bowing of the head create a posture of defeat. The refrain — "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion" — is paradoxical: the speaker has been physically unfaithful but emotionally constant. The exclamation mark after "Cynara!" gives the name the force of a cry — a calling-out to someone who cannot hear.
"All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, / Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; / And surely in the lilies and languor of the day, / I am not what I was under the reign of good Cynara."
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.