I can not quite recollect when I first came across the poet Ernest Christopher Dowson. Perhaps it was while listening to one of the many recorded anthologies of verse which have delighted me over the years. Possibly I read his “They are not long the weeping and the laughter” while browsing through the Oxford Book of English Verse. Be that as it may, I was delighted to come across The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson With A Memoir By Arthur Symons as a free download in the Amazon Kindle store, http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000JQUZY6?ie=UTF8&ref_=oce_digital_UK.

Dowson was born in 1867 and died in 1900 at the tragically young age of 30. During his short life he produced some of the most moving poetry in the English language including his often quoted “They are not Long”

“They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate;

I think they…