Dowson’s Lunatic Asylum

Abstract Chapter 5 discusses Dowson’s symbolist turn, concentrating upon his adoption of lunar symbolism in a series of lyrics from the middle of 1891, and his only short play. Prompted by traditional associations linking ‘the lunatic, the lover, and the Poet’; by Pater’s essays, which henceforth become the most elemental atmosphere of his thought; by his deepening engagement with the works of Verlaine; and by the tribulations of fellow Rhymer, John Evelyn Barlas, Dowson began to scrutinize the situation of the Decadent artist in ‘To One in Bedlam’, before presenting a substantial exposition in his extended lyrical ‘phantasy’. Commissioned by sometime-Rhymer William Theodore Peters, The Pierrot of the Minute is a satirical rejoinder to the kind of ‘æsthetic poetry’ wrought upon the paralyzing epistemological basis of Pater’s withdrawn conclusion to The Renaissance. Enstraitened within this zone of aestheticized minutiae, the poet’s Pierrotic diminishment must necessarily follow, Dowson contends, presciently.