“A man may long for water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it.” — Ernest Dowson | V2Melody

“A man may long for water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it.”

A concise rebuttal of the idea that human longing proves the existence of what is longed for · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

About Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867–23 February 1900

In the fading light of Victorian England, when the certainties of empire began to crack and a fin-de-siècle weariness settled over the literary world, Ernest Christopher Dowson emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices of his generation. His brief, tragic life—spanning a mere thirty-two years from 1867 to…

More by Ernest Dowson

Poems by Ernest Dowson

More remarks by Ernest Dowson

“I have broken my heart over her, but she remains, none the less, my sole interest in life.”

Expressing the consuming persistence of unrequited love despite emotional ruin · Letter to Arthur Moore

Despair
Love

“A reasonable self-love without passion or thought of others, and with the end of self-culture before us, is better than a million emotions.”

Advocating disciplined self-development rather than surrender to feeling · Marginal note in his copy of The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“My latest Valueless Villanelle I enclose you. It has been sent to Atalanta and I await its return with a philosophic resignation which I would I could muster equally where my prose is in question.”

Showing Dowson's habitual self-deprecation about poetry and his greater emotional investment in prose · Letter to Arthur Moore, 1 June 1890