'Gone With The Wind' and 'Days of Wine and Roses' . . . both titles of famous films, but where did they come from? Not from the films' screenwriters, if you didn't know. They were actually lines taken from poems by Ernest Dowson, a late-Victorian wordsmith belonging to a group of poets we now call the 'Decadents'. They are timeless lines written by a brilliant but tragic individual. Margaret Mitchell, author of the novel 'Gone With The Wind', and JP Miller, creator of the play 'Days of Wine and Roses', had both made inspirational choices for the titles of their masterpieces. Dowson, like so many gifted but ill-fated artists, had delivered from beyond the grave.
Ernest Christopher Dowson was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and Aubrey Beardsley. He suffered badly from depression and alcohol abuse, but through the maze of desperate confusion and unhappiness emerged some of the greatest poems of that remarkable era. He succumbed to tuberculosis in 1900, having spent thirty-two difficult years on this earth. He died in poverty; we are richer for his being born a genius.
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.
