Books: Faithful In His Fashion

ERNEST DOWSON— Mark Longaker—Universify of Pennsylvania Press ($4).

I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out out of mind . . . I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.

Long before the decade's most famous book title was lifted from this lyric, the poems of Ernest Christopher Dowson were a part of the established pattern of English poetry—"not speech, but perfect song," said Dowson's late, great contemporary, William Butler Yeats....