All fled, All Done
by Rusty Burke
How long have we all accepted that Howard's self-written
epitaph
All fled, all done, so lift me on the
pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire.
was paraphrased from Ernest Dowson's "Non sum qualis eram
bonae sub regno Cynarae" (or "Cynara"), the last
stanza of which reads:
I
cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
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."
At least since 1966, when Sprague de Camp wrote in
"Memories of R.E.H." (Amra #38):
The second line
of the farewell couplet seems to be a paraphrase of a line
in the fourth and last stanza of the well-known poem,
"Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,"
by Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867-1900)....
Dowson, a minor Victorian poet who
died young of tuberculosis and alcoholism, also wrote a
number of poems full of the studied melancholy and
self-conscious thanatophilia that sometimes occurs in
Howard's verse.
By The Miscast Barbarian (published by Gerry de la Ree,
1975), in that disarming way Mr. de Camp has of turning
speculation into statements of fact, this became, "The second
line of this couplet is paraphrased from a poem by Ernest
Christopher Dowson...." Steve Eng picked this up in his
excellent study, "The Poetry of Robert E. Howard" (in The
Dark Barbarian, Greenwood Press, 1984): after noting that
Howard's friend Harold Preece had written that Bob "would
have thought little of a weakling like Ernest Dowson" (in a
letter to Glenn Lord published in The Howard Collector),
Eng says, "There are other uncanny Dowson parallels in his
life, as well as Dowson echoes in his poetry, culminating in the
suicide note found in Howard's typewriter: a scrap of paraphrase
from Dowson's 'Cynara'...."
It never has occurred to me to quibble with this.
Although, unlike Eng, I found no particular affinities between
Howard's poetry and Dowson's more languorous verse, there was no
mistaking that line, "...the feast is finished and the lamps
expire."
Well, hold on.
Engaged in literary detective work, I have been scanning a
number of poetry collections for scraps that Howard had
quoted. In a little book called Songs of Adventure,
edited by Robert Frothingham (Houghton Mifflin, 1926), I stumbled
by chance upon a poem by Benjamin De Casseres ("The Closed
Room") which Howard used some lines from in "The Door to
the World" (published in Fantasy Crosswinds as
"The Door to the Garden"). Then, scanning over the
contents, I found that the collection included Bill Adams'
"Flower of the Morning," which Howard had used in
memorializing his friend Herbert Klatt, although this anthology
presented it under the title "Light of the
Morning." So I'm paging through the book wondering if
maybe I might stumble upon the sources of a couple of other little
scraps of poetry which Howard had quoted but not identified.
And I ran across this, on pages 154-155:
THE HOUSE OF CÆSAR
Yea -- we have thought of royal robes and red.
Had purple dreams of words we utterèd;
Have lived once more the moment in the brain
That stirred the multitude to shout again.
All done, all fled, and now
we faint and tire --
The Feast is over and the lamps
expire!
Yea -- we have launched a ship on sapphire seas,
And felt the steed between the gripping knees;
Have breathed the evening when the huntsman brought
The stiffening trophy of the fevered sport --
Have crouched by rivers in the grassy meads
To watch for fish that dart amongst the weeds.
All well, all good -- so hale from sun and mire --
The Feast is over and the lamps
expire!
Yet -- we have thought of Love as men may think,
Who drain a cup because they needs must drink;
Have brought a jewel from beyond the seas
To star a crown of blue anemones.
All fled, all done -- a
Cæsar's brief desire --
The Feast is over and the lamps
expire!
Yea -- and what is there that we have not done,
The Gods provided us 'twixt sun and sun?
Have we not watched an hundred legions thinned,
And crushed and conquered, succorèd and sinned?
Lo -- we who moved the lofty gods to ire --
The Feast is over and the lamps
expire!
Yea -- and what voice shall reach us and shall give
Our earthly self a moment more to live?
What arm shall fold us and shall come between
Our failing body and the grasses green?
And the last heart that beats beneath this head --
Shall it be heard or unrememberèd?
All dim, all pale -- so lift me on
the pyre --
The Feast is over and the lamps
expire!
-- Viola Garvin
Need I add anything? Seems to me there is no question
that this is the source of those lines. If the repeated
refrain weren't enough, the occurrence of the phrases "all
fled, all done" and "so lift me on the pyre" would
seem to clinch it.
We had some discussion of this on the REH-fans list, with it
being noted that, the tone of this poem differing from that of
Dowson's, it puts a new slant on Howard's mood at the time of his
suicide.
In trying to run down more information on Viola Garvin, I found
two roughly contemporary women; Viola Gerard Garvin
(1898-????), an editor at the
London Observer and author of Dedication (London:
Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1928), and Viola (Taylor) Garvin, author of
As You See It (by "V"; London: Methuen & Co.,
1922) and of a novel, the title of which I don't recall, but which
need not concern us. The poem does not appear in either of
the ladies' books, unfortunately. I am inclined toward the
former by stylistic similarities between this poem and those in Dedication.
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