by Oscar Wilde
MYRRHINA: How strangely he spake to me. And with what scorn he did regard me. I wonder why he spake to me so strangely.
HONORIUS: Myrrhina, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I see now clearly what I did not see before. Take me to Alexandria and let me taste of the seven sins.
MYRRHINA: Do not mock me, Honorius, nor speak to me with such bitter words. For I have repented of my sins and I am seeking a cavern in this desert where I too may dwell so that my soul may become worthy to see God.
HONORIUS: The sun is setting, Myrrhina. Come with me to Alexandria.
MYRRHINA: I will not go to Alexandria.
HONORIUS: Farewell, Myrrhina.
MYRRHINA: Honorius, farewell. No, no, do not go.
I have cursed my beauty for what it has done, and cursed the wonder of my body for the evil that it has brought upon you.
Lord, this man brought me to Thy feet. He told me of Thy coming upon earth, and of the wonder of Thy birth and the great wonder of Thy death also. By him, O Lord, Thou wast revealed to me.
HONORIUS: You talk as a child, Myrrhina, and without knowledge. Loosen your hands. Why didst thou come to this valley in thy beauty?
MYRRHINA: The God whom thou worshipped led me here that I might repent of my iniquities and know Him as the Lord.
HONORIUS: Why didst thou tempt me with words?
MYRRHINA: That thou shouldst see Sin in its painted mask and look on Death in its robe of Shame.
THE POEMS
Introduction by
DECLAN KIBERD
‘We Irish are too poetical to be poets,’ lamented Wilde, who tended to see his life as the real poem and his writings as no more than marginal commentaries on it. ‘But,’ he modestly added, ‘we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’
Behind the mask of flippancy, he was making, as always, a very serious point: that the romantic notion of the poet, as a colourful and intense character, was not necessarily conducive to great poetry. The true artist possessed not so much a fixed and ready-made identity as a capacity to empathise at different moments with all moods, persons and things. The poet might turn out to be the most unpoetical thing in God’s creation. Wilde’s own chosen model, John Keats, had said no less when he remarked that men of genius were great as certain chemicals operating on the mass of neutral intellect, but ‘they have not any individuality, any determined character’. What they had instead was Negative Capability, the capacity to become this or that thing as the occasion demanded. The surest way for such an artist to strengthen intellect was to let the mind become a thoroughfare for all possible thoughts, to suspend a final judgement for as long as could be.
The traces of Keats – his sensuous classicism, his word-music, his tragic sense of doom – are pervasive in Wilde’s own poems: but even more potent is the influence of Keats’s aesthetic principles, the chief of which was that the artist must compartmentalise personality for the purpose of literary utterance. Although Keats has a reputation as the quintessential romantic, he was also the forerunner of those modernists who saw the progress of the poet as an escape from personality into a more classical objectivity. The massive pressure under which romantic authors like Wordsworth had placed the first person singular was bound to lead to eventual exhaustion: Keats himself had wittily mocked it as ‘the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’. Half a century later, Wilde developed this insight in his delightful assertion that ‘all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling’. The best way to intensify a personality was not to make it singular, but to multiply it: otherwise, in being true to a single self, a person might be simultaneously false to half a dozen others. When Victorian headmasters praised a boy as having ‘character’, what they really meant was that he was stable and predictable in his devotion to a single self-image – in other words, earnest and safe. Such stable selves might be well-fitted to running an industry or an empire, but they were not good for art. The price for rejecting the possibilities of multiple selfhood had been paid by an England which had produced no great play in the nineteenth century until the advent of Wilde and Shaw: but it could also be measured in the increasing banality of a poetry which overworked the buzz-word T.
Art was art because of its delight in the play of ideas and feelings: a truth in art was that whose opposite might also be true. So Wilde invented the idea of the mask, which would prove so useful to Yeats and others. It would be more accurate to say, however, that Wilde discovered the uses of the mask when he moved from Ireland to England. His undergraduate career at Oxford proved that the Irishman only discovers himself as such when he goes abroad: at home in Dublin, Wilde had been seen as an Anglo-Irish youth, but in Oxford he appeared to his friends as a flashy, if fastidious, Paddy with ‘a suspicion of brogue’ and ‘an unfamiliar turn to his phrasing’. The university helped him to shape his belief that ‘man is least himself when he talks in his own person’, but ‘give him a mask and he will tell you the truth’.
Anglo-Saxonist theorists of the later nineteenth century held that the Celts were doomed by their multiple selfhood. It was said that Celts could see so many options in a situation that they were invariably immobilised, unlike English specialists who might have simplified themselves, but who did not succumb to pitfalls which they had not the imagination to discern. Wilde, however, contended that in this Celtic psychology lay the shape of things to come. He has been described as the first major artist to discredit the romantic idea of ‘sincerity’ and to replace it with the darker modern imperative of ‘authenticity’. He wrote from the perspective of one who sees that the only real fool on earth is the conventionally ‘sincere’ man who fails to see that he, also, is wearing a mask, the mask of his own sincerity. If all good art must somehow contain the essential criticisms of its prevailing codes, an authentic life must also recognise all that is most opposed to it.
This rich and revolutionary philosophy was applied most fully in Wilde’s plays, which in a sense complete the paradox – for, if the artist wished for a poetry emptied of all personal feeling, he could nonetheless boast of having made the drama as personal as the lyric poem. It may well be that there is a great deal more of Wilde’s autobiography concealed in his plays than in any of his poems, and a great deal more poetry too. This element was noted by W. H. Auden when he shrewdly described the plays as ‘verbal opera’. He was thinking, perhaps, of the wonderful iambic pentameters and the cunning alliteration with which, for instance, Lady Harbury’s mourning after the death of a troublesome husband is evoked:
‘I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.’
As one could know the poet by his music, said Wilde in his essay on ‘The Decay of Dying’, so one could tell the liar by his rhythmic utterance. The line about Lady Harbury is worthy of Alexander Pope.
It was, however, in the early poems that such skills were honed and the theory of multiple selfhood put to the initial test. In these lyrics, the tone varies form the sensuous to the strict, from the cavalier to the puritanical. If one lyric celebrates Keats as ‘poet-painter of our English land’, another excoriates that same land with Miltonic austerity as a fallen place guilty of the sins of empire. Sometimes these two seemingly opposed movements are rehearsed within a single poem. ‘Ave Imperatrix’ by its very title promises a celebration of Britain’s global rule, only to become at its half-way point a terrified accounting of its human costs, to rulers as well as to ruled:
What profit now that we have bound
The whole world round with nets of gold,
If hidden in our heart is found
The care that groweth never old?
The only hope is that ‘the young Republic’ of Wilde’s dreams will ‘rise from these crimson seas of war’.
Milton, Blake and Shelley were the presiding exemplars of this radical aesthetic, with Oliver Cromwell featuring in a surprising number of references as emblematic of the country’s lost radicalism. Long before T. S. Eliot defined the canon of English literature as royalist, Wilde had pointed to an equal
ly illustrious tradition of republican dissidence: in his commonplace book, kept while at Oxford, he averred that it was to dissenters like Bunyan and Milton that most of the progress of England was owed and he berated Matthew Arnold for giving such writers less than their deserts. A cavalier in his prose, Wilde proved something of a puritan in his poetry…though in ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ he was honest enough to admit that his own radicalism was motivated more by the idea of apocalyptic change than by a deep fellow-feeling with the victims of poverty and oppression. His refusal to sentimentalise such victims, or to stake a claim to such empathy, would be a cornerstone of his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. There, as in many of these poems, against the exacting Christian ideal of living for others, he posits what he sees as the truly Christ-like principle of the person who prefers to live for him- or herself. Wilde’s Jesus is, in this respect, very like Kierkegaard’s: a man who, on the Day of Judgement, will not ask penitents why they failed to be more like him, but instead why they refused to become themselves.
Many of these early lyrics chronicle the young Wilde’s conflicting responses to the experience of Rome, always a supreme test of English Protestant nerve in nineteenth century writing. ‘Easter Day’ shows a man at once fascinated and repelled by Popish opulence, though the final note is a Miltonic disapproval of a false and garish priesthood which betrays the true simplicity of Christ, who, even then, appeared to Wilde in the guise of artistmartyr. ‘On the Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters’ develops this image by likening the poet’s fate to that of the crucified Jesus, for whose garments the squalid Roman soldiers cast lots. Such a complex of ideas, conflating artistry and sacrifice, combining pagan energy with Christlike suffering, had a huge effect in Ireland, and would be invoked to devastating effect by Patrick Pearse and the rebel poets of the 1916 Rising.
Again and again in the poems, Wilde’s breath is taken away by the baroque magnificence of Rome, against which he usually sets the more chastely proportioned symmetries of ancient Greece. If Greece tends to win out in the contrast, that is because so often Wilde’s Greece is no more than a version of his own ideal England. ‘This English Thames is holier far than Rome’, not just because it is the river which nurtured his radical heroes, but also because England too has its own sense of artistic form and ethical decorum. Wilde’s reputation as an art-for-art’s-sake bohemian is one of the great misrepresentations of modern journalism, connived in, of course, by himself. These poems demonstrate what many have long suspected, that the dandy was at heart a moralist who wished to preach his parables to people in some acceptably sugared form. If so many of his disciples licked off the sugar and disdained the pill underneath, that was not completely his fault.
When the Poems were published in 1881, the more astute readers sensed that the visible swagger with which Wilde denounced the enemies of beauty could not completely conceal the rather conventional style and morality beneath. Punch magazine announced rather patronisingly that they were but ‘Swinburne and water’. Oliver Elton detected chronic plagiarism and counselled the Oxford Union not to accept a gift of the poems which its members had solicited of Wilde for their library: ‘They are in fact by William Shakespeare, by Philip Sidney, by John Donne, by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne, and by sixty more, whose words have furnished the list of passages which I hold in my hand at this moment. The Union Library already contains better and fuller editions of all these poets…’ On the other side, J. A. Symonds praised the book, and especially ‘Humanitad’, as producing ‘strains which, if properly developed, might be trumpets in our time’.
Why did Wilde not blossom into one of the age’s foremost poets? One answer has already been hinted at: he simply transferred his poetry-making impulse to the plays and prose. Another may lie in the fact that, by the later nineteenth century, poetry no longer enjoyed the prestige which it had had in the days of Wordsworth and Keats: indeed, the tradition in which they had worked seemed in terminal decline. ‘Why do you not write prose?’ Walter Pater had asked: ‘Prose is so much more difficult.’ In that context, Rodney Shewan’s post-mortem on Poems is acute indeed: ‘the volume reads like a personal anthology through which the poet, as nostalgic critic of some five centuries of verse, attempts to define his relationship to a tradition which had disintegrated before he has had the chance to contribute to it.’
Wilde did, however, make a final and very memorable contribution to English poetry. ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, first published by Prisoner No. C.3.3, carried his theories of poetic impersonality into a new dimension (though many people guessed all too easily who the author was). Despite its intermittent bathos and too-obvious looting of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the ballad does not fail to live, being if not exactly a great poem, then at least one which has the whiff of greatness about some of its stanzas. In it, Wilde finally rejects Greek ideas of self-creation through joy and instead resigns himself to a Christian notion of purgation through pain. Though born a Protestant, Wilde died a Catholic: and, in fact, even his sparkling comedies are informed by the morality of felix culpa, the happy fault or fortunate fall, according to which a person is educated by sin into a deeper self-knowledge. If, in its comic mode, this notion is expressed in aphorisms about experience being the name a man gives to his mistakes, its tragic corollary was summed up by a fellow-Irishman, James Joyce. He said that, for all its Greek colourings, the Wildean personality was finally placed in service to a theory of beauty which ‘at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine except through that sense of separation and loss called sin’. Even those early poems which seem most dismissive of Catholicism will be found to contain that undertow of fascination and awe which would draw their author to it.
POEMS
EDITORIAL NOTE
The order of the poetry which follows is chronological by date of composition or of publication. The reasons for this change are given in the 1994 introduction. The texts were taken from the 1882 edition wherever possible. Poems not included in that edition are taken from vol. IX of the 1908 Collected Works or, in the case of ‘Pan’ and ‘Désespoir’, from later editions. Of the fifteen additional poems not before included in the Collins Complete Works (see Appendix D), all but two have been taken from manuscript sources. For Wilde’s own thematic grouping of the poems for the 1882 edition, see Appendix B.
YE SHALL BE GODS
Before the dividing of days
Or the singing of summer or spring
God from the dust did raise
A splendid and goodly thing:
Man – from the womb of the land,
Man – from the sterile sod
Torn by a terrible hand –
Formed in the image of God.
But the life of man is a sorrow
And death a relief from pain,
For love only lasts till tomorrow
And life without love is vain.
ΣTPOΦH1
And your strength will wither like grass
Scorched by a pitiless sun,
And the might of your hands will pass
And the sands of your life will run.
O gods not of saving but sorrow
Whose joy is in weeping of men,
Who shall lend thee their life, or who borrow
From others to give thee again?
O gods ever wrathful and tearless,
O gods not of night but of day,
Though your faces be frowning and fearless
Thy kingdom shall pass – men say.
ANTIΣTPOΦH1
The spirit of man is arisen
And crowned as a mighty King.
The people have broken from prison
And the voices once voiceless now sing.
Cry aloud, O dethroned and defeated,
Cry aloud for the fading of might,
Too long were ye feared and entreated,
Too long did men worship thy light.
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Aye, weep for your crimes without number,
The loving and luring of men,
For your greatness is sunken in slumber,
Your light will n’er lighten again.
ΣTPOΦH B
But as many a lovely flower
Is born of a sterile seed,
In a fatal and fearful hour
There grew from this creedless breed
Love – fostered in flame and in fire
That dies but to blossom again,
Love – ever distilling desire
Like wine with the eyelids of men.
We kneel to the great Iapygian,
We bow to the Lampsacene’s shrine,
For hers is the only religion,
And hers to entice and entwine –
ANTIΣTPOΦH B
There once was another, men tell us,
The giver and taker of life,
A lovingless God and a jealous
Whose joy was in weeping and strife.
He is gone; and his temple ‘tis sunken
In ashes and fallen in dust,
For the souls of the people are drunken
With dreams of the Lady of Lust –
We kneel to the Cyprian Mother,
We take up our lyres and sing,
‘Thou are crowned with the crown of another,
Thou are throned where another was King.’
CHORUS OF CLOUD MAIDENS
’, 275-290, 298-3131
ΣTPOΦH2
Cloud maidens that float on for ever,
Dew-sprinkled, fleet bodies, and fair,
Let us rise from our Sire’s loud river,
Great Ocean, and soar through the air