Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Dowson

Desolate and sick: Dowson compresses an entire late-Victorian hangover into six words. The line doesn’t just register sadness; it performs exhaustion as style. “Old passion” suggests something once grand enough to organize a life, now reduced to a chronic ailment. “Sick of” is the key turn of the screw: it’s both boredom and nausea, implying the speaker has rehearsed this feeling so often it’s become physically intolerable. Romance isn’t merely failing; it’s spoiling.

Dowson, a poster child for the 1890s Decadent mood, writes from a culture fascinated by overstimulation and its aftermath. This is the era of aestheticism and “experience” treated like a drug, with the inevitable crash built into the pose. The diction is plain, almost anti-poetic, which makes the sentiment feel less like lofty tragedy and more like a private confession overheard at closing time. “Desolate” gives us the big, literary emptiness; “sick” drags it into the body, where yearning becomes symptomatic.

The subtext is self-indicting. An “old passion” can be read as a love affair, but also as the speaker’s own appetite for intensity, the cultivated habit of longing. Dowson’s genius is to make the melodrama look threadbare on purpose: the line admits that what once felt like fate now feels like repetition. It’s not heartbreak as a single event; it’s heartbreak as a lifestyle one can no longer afford.