Articles Available Online

Windblown: gone with the summer wind Windblown: gone with the autumn wind Windblown: gone with the winter wind Windblown: gone with the vernal wind Dowson spits into a china cup, his pocket-watch has broken; recalling a tryst with a pretty shopgirl he writes from his Catford cot in Tarling’s Superior No2 blue-black ink Our tongues entwined But did not knot Tanned by the summer wind Depressed by the autumn wind Frozen by the winter wind Driven by the vernal wind John Gawsworth tried to set the record straight contra Arthur Symons & Frank Harris’ misrepresentations, quash that sordid legend of Dowson the soak You were just a hard-pressed bloke, tubercular Pierrot, a fin-de-siècle card, Old Cheshire Cheese outsider with bad teeth and shiny kneed Baudelairean trousers! Windblown: gone with the summer wind Windblown: gone with the autumn wind Windblown: gone with the winter wind Windblown: gone with the vernal wind In the iconic Oxford photo you look dapper, a crème-de-menthe poet in the making, verses soon to prove unprofitable: bunches of cut flowers spoilt by English weather, each word a stain, each thought a cliché: ‘sad waters of separation Bear us on to the ultimate night’ [1] Tanned by the summer wind Depressed by the autumn wind Frozen by the winter wind Driven by the vernal wind; sleepwalking towards the twentieth century, in Romanticism’s last light quote/unquote an empty shell, quote/ unquote a private hell in the arms of gin or absinthe, puffing a Vevey cigar Windblown: gone with the summer wind Windblown: gone with the autumn wind Windblown: gone with the winter wind Windblown: gone with the vernal wind Stuck in a cabbie’s shelter on Charing X Road a gaslit rue of papers, books and Cockney strollers, warped Elysian images throng your poor head, lust the shade of Colman’s mustard advertised on trams clopping