Still Point of the Turning World

Abstract Chapter 4 examines Dowson’s first-hand encounter with Carthusian monasticism in the months before his Catholic conversion. Visiting St Hugh’s Monastery in Sussex on Easter Monday 1891, Dowson was deeply moved by the monks’ commitment to solitude, silence, and simplicity, and he began to seek these qualities in his verse. ‘Carthusians’, one of Dowson’s longest published lyrics, offers a postcard-perfect account of Dowson’s pilgrimage to Cowfold. It demonstrates the workings of his vivid, widely responsive, and highly syncretic imagination, and may well have been inspired by the fresco now installed in the Fathers’ Chapterhouse: Antoine Sublet’s awesome Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII, which awaited marouflage on-site at the time of his visit. As the startling envoi to the lyric suggests, Dowson’s encounter with Carthusian monasticism focused his distrust of Protestant modernity, and enabled him to hone his critique of cultural and literary Decadence.