Renegade

To Arthur Chamberlain

But all that now is over.
Dreamers of dreams shall not in me discover
Fallen remembrances of Holy Land;
Looks in mine eyes, that seem to understand
A banished secret; in my common mien,
A charmed communion with high things unseen

For all that now is over.
Mere merchant of earth’s market-place, no lover,
I keep the dusty, trodden road of all.
Though broken echoes fill the mart, and call
Back to my silent memories: down chill air
They die away, and leave me to my care.

Since all that now is over,
And not at any cost can I recover
The abdicated throne, the abandoned crown:
I sit me at the heart of the vast town,
To wear old love looks down to the dull look,
Befitting love unthought on, or forsook.

The work of Lionel Johnson (1867-1902), the English poet and essayist, was much admired by, and a formative influence on, his friend WB Yeats. His poems are shaped by his classicism, his consciousness of his Welsh ancestry and a sense of strong personal affiliation with Ireland. Johnson was a member of Yeats’s Rhymers’ Club, and is associated with the Decadent movement of the 1890s.

Renegade is one of his faultless pieces of lyric verse. Its three six-lined, beautifully cadenced stanzas are linked by a nuanced refrain, each time beginning with a different conjunction. The avoidance of closure at the end of the first verse is especially notable, thanks to the connective first word of the new stanza’s first line, “For all that now is over”. The pararhyme in each stanza’s opening lines (“over / discover”; “ over / lover”; “ over / recover”) asserts the certainty of the loss of “all that”, and that an ineradicable echo or shadow remains. Renegade is a song of disillusionment and defeat, shot through with the brilliance of a memory that refuses to fade entirely into the past.

The lost ideal itself is never defined clearly. In the first stanza it takes the form of “Holy Land”, a “banished secret” and a “charmed communion with high things unseen”. Some of the symbolism is a reminder of Johnson’s conversion to Catholicism in 1891, and raises the possibility of a lament, not for lost faith, for which there seems to be no evidence, but for an ideal associated with it. Phrases such as “charmed communion” and “banished secret” suggest nevertheless that Johnson’s Holy Land is broader interior terrain, possibly erotic.

On the basis of better-known poems, such as The Dark Angel, Johnson’s life and work are usually interpreted through the prism of suppressed homosexuality. Renegade might be read as a farewell to the erotic enchantment that had only ever been attainable in a dream, or through its poetic expression.

Many of Johnson’s poems bear dedications. The identity of the dedicatee here, Arthur Chamberlain, is uncertain, but he may have been his Rhymers’ Club associate, AB Chamberlain, who is described in the Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club anthology as “affiliated permanent guest”. Perhaps he was the special friend in whom Johnson confides in another beautiful lyric, The Precept of Silence. If the date, 1887, given to Renegade in the 1895 collection Poems is correct, it suggests the poem pre-existed the club: of course, the friendship may have come first, or the dedication added later. Renegade’s opening conjunction “But …” suggests that the imagined reader would recognise that, in spite of the intensity recalled, whatever prompted the emotion is “over”, and would share the regret.

In the opening and closing stanzas, there’s an emphasis on the speaker’s physical appearance, his eyes and looks. These particulars match the intimate tone, the sense that the poet is confiding in someone who can imagine his face. At the same time, the poem has a wide embrace: its intensity admits all young and no-longer-young “dreamers of dreams”.

Unexpectedly, the second stanza conjures an ancient, nomadic scene: the poet is a “merchant of earth’s market-place, no lover” and “broken echoes fill the mart” as if memories stirred and died again on the traded and degraded ground. Aiming to depict the ordinary, “dusty, trodden road of all”, Johnson creates a particularly haunted scene, before the “silent memories” are drawn away “down chill air”, replaced by oppressive “care” and seemingly abandoned.

In this newly bleak setting, images of abandoned worldly grandeur, the throne and crown, represent the price and magnitude of the speaker’s loss. It was a kingdom, and is beyond restoration. He has chosen to disappear, crouched “at the heart” of an urban scene. He desires anonymity. But there’s still the implication that his emotion must be concealed from someone who might, too tenderly, observe it: he requires himself not to “wear” his “old love looks” but to “wear [them] down” – as if he could commit an act of slow but violent erosion of himself, so that only the “dull look” remains. This look appears nevertheless to be a mask: “Befitting love unthought on, or forsook.” None of the denials the poem lists are convincing, and yet the denials are passionate, and central: a survival mechanism, not a pose. And one of the secrets of Johnson’s extraordinary lyric is that the speaker has forgotten nothing of the blaze and richness of his lost Holy Land.