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 Tom Barney

Nay, wherefore seek the seasons to forestall?

It is but playing, and she will not care,
A little, passionately, not at all!
She would not answer us if we should call
Across the years: her visions are too fair;
And what care we how many petals fall!
She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall
With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair,
A little, passionately, not at all!
Knee-deep she goes in meadow grasses tall,
Kissed by the daisies that her fingers tear:
And what care we how many petals fall!
We pass and go: but she shall not recall
What men we were, nor all she made us bear:
‘A little, passionately, not at all!’
And what care we how many petals fall!

George Orwell regarded Dowson as one of the better poets of the end of the nine-
teenth century but, because he believed that this was a poor period for poetry,
realised that this was not saying very much. Of Dowson’s most famous poem,
Cynara, he observed:
I know it is a bad poem, but it is bad in a good way, or good in a bad way, and I
do not wish to pretend that I never admired it. . . Surely those lines possess, if not
actual merit, at least the same kind of charm as belongs to a pink geranium or a
soft-centre chocolate. (Orwell 1970: 350)
I too must confess to some enjoyment of Dowson’s poetry; it does not deserve to be
altogether forgotten. Nonetheless ‘charming but at best second-rate’ is the judge-
ment I would want to make about it in general, and about Villanelle of Marguerites
in particular. The poem conveys little more than the vague ‘mood’ which Stillman
suggested villanelles lend themselves to conveying. In other words, Dowson has
not broken away from this form’s prototypical function.
Except in the first two stanzas, the first line of each stanza begins with a
present-tense statement about a person who is referred to simply as ‘she’; and the
first two stanzas contain such a statement beginning in the second line (which in
the first stanza is after all the only line which is not a refrain). Each such state-
ment shifts the poem’s topic slightly, but there is no real ‘argument’: merely a
series of loosely connected images. The stanzas can be divided into two groups,
those that deal with the woman referred to in some kind of proximity to nature,
and those that deal with the woman’s attitudes to the body of (presumably) men
referred to as ‘we’, who are in thrall to her. In the first group are the first and