By investigating varieties of apartness, in this chapter I inquire into Dowson's complex manifestations of desire and tactics of non-encounter. The Decadent image here reaches a gauzy, mental state in which eros subsists in the form of its own suggestion. Through abstinent and flamboyant self-deprecating moods, Dowson's poetics develops into a morbid desiring of desire. In the early 1890s, Dowson planned a joint volume of poetry with Victor Plarr, with the tentative title Vine-leaf and Violet; Lionel Johnson was a possible third collaborator. The book never came to fruition (Plarr 1914: 80–1). What abided, though, was the poem ‘A Coronal’, which Dowson subtitled ‘With His Songs and Her Days to His Lady and to Love’ and included in Verses. The alliterative line on /v/ (a poetic sound highly prized by Dowson), ‘Violets and leaves of vine’, referring to the ‘wreath’, echoes the mantra of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, who speaks enigmatically of ‘vine leaves’ in Ejlert Lövborg's hair (1981: 227). Dowson attended a performance of Ibsen's play in London in 1891 and was thoroughly impressed. He felt a strong identification with this nonconformist play, which operated like a Trojan Horse at the heart of the Victorian bourgeoisie: the radical individualism and self-destructiveness of the two aforementioned characters, and the strain of Aesthetic Beauty promoted by Hedda, as symbolised by the ‘vine leaves’. In ‘A Coronal’, the ‘violets and leaves of vine’ invite diverse readings: they could refer to the Dionysian immersion of the subject (a motif explicitly employed in the poem about ‘Cynara’) or to the aestheticised nursing of fleeting ‘Love’ whilst projecting its tragic demise. Dowson sets up an impasse in which desire is fed from the loss – even forthcoming loss – of the ideal moment. In Dowson, Wilde's amour de l'impossible becomes an extreme brooding obsession.