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,
5 Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
io But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 15 Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
20 But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
1891,1896
1. I am not as I was under the reign of the good son, who seemed to drink so little and had so much Cynara (Latin; Horace, Odes 4.1.3?4). In this dignity and reserve, was breaking his heart for the poem the poet pleads with Venus to stop torment-daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating house, ing him with love, since he is growing old and is in dissipation and drink.' Dowson's 'Cynara' was, no longer what he was when under the sway of in fact, a Polish girl by the name of Adelaide Fol- Cynara (Sitt-ah-rah), the girl he used to love. Of tinowicz; he fell in love with her when she was Dowson's 'Cynara' W. B. Yeats later wrote: 'Dow-eleven and he was twenty-two years of age.
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THE Y AR E NO T LON G / 182 5 They Are Not Long Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.' 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. 1896
1. The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes (Latin; Horace, Odes 1.4.15).
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Tke Twentietk Century an J Aft er
1914-18: World War! 1922: James Joyce's Ulysses; T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land 1929: Stock market crash; Great Depression begins 1939-45: World War II 1947: India and Pakistan become independent nations 1953: Premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot 1957?62: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago
become independent nations 1958: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart 1991: Collapse of the Soviet Union 2001: Attacks destroy World Trade Center
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century. The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on 'art for art's sake,' assaulted middle-class assumptions about the nature and function of art. Rejecting Victorian notions of the artist's moral and educational duties, aestheticism helped widen the breach between writers and the general public, resulting in the 'alienation' of the modern artist from society. This alienation is evident in the lives and work of the French symbolists and other late-nineteenth-century bohemians who repudiated conventional notions of respectability, and it underlies key works of modern literature, such as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T. S. Eliot's Waste Land.
The growth of public education in England as a result of the Education Act of 1870, which finally made elementary schooling compulsory and universal, led to the rapid emergence of a mass literate population, at whom a new mass- produced popular literature and new cheap journalism (the 'yellow press') were directed. The audience for literature split up into 'highbrows,' 'middlebrows,' and 'lowbrows,' and the segmentation of the reading public, developing with unprecedented speed and to an unprecedented degree, helped widen the gap between popular art and art esteemed only by the sophisticated and the expert. This breach yawned ever wider with the twentieth-century emergence of modernist iconoclasm and avant-garde experiment in literature, music, and the visual arts.
Queen Victoria's contemporaries felt her Jubilee in 1887 and, even more, her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the end of an era. The reaction against middle-class Victorian attitudes that is central to modernism was already under way in the two decades before the queen's death in 1901. Samuel Butler
1827
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182 8 / THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
