![]() He took from his pocket a little silver-clasped morocco case, and handed it to me. 'I want to hear about you first,' I said. 'Oh, anywhere you like!' he answered - 'to the restaurant in the Bois we will dine there, and you shall tell me all about yourself.' ![]() No, not a yellow carriage, any other colour - there, that dark-green one will do ' and in a few moments we were trotting down the boulevard in the direction of the Madeleine. 'Let us go for a drive,' he answered, 'it is too crowded here. 'I believe you have a mystery in your life, Gerald,' I exclaimed 'tell me about it.' 'I cannot love where I cannot trust,' he replied. 'My dear Gerald,' I said, 'women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.' 'I don't understand women well enough,' he answered. I felt it could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers so I concluded that it was a woman, and asked him if he was married yet. ![]() He looked anxious and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something. We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth, but I think we really admired him all the more for his frankness. I had liked him immensely, he was so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honourable. We had not met since we had been at college together, nearly ten years before, so I was delighted to come across him again, and we shook hands warmly. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.One afternoon I was sitting outside the Cafe de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me, when I heard some one call my name. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. But in a career spanning some twenty years, Wilde created a body of work which continues to be read an enjoyed by people around the world: a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray short stories and fairy tales such as ‘ The Happy Prince’ and ‘ The Selfish Giant’ poems including The Ballad of Reading Gaol and essay-dialogues which were witty revivals of the Platonic philosophical dialogue.īut above all, it is Wilde’s plays that he continues to be known for, and these include witty drawing-room comedies such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as a Biblical drama, Salome (which was banned from performance in the UK and had to be staged abroad). The life of the Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is as famous as – perhaps even more famous than – his work. The repeated line, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’, takes on a wider metaphorical significance in the context of Wilde’s own life.įor a good edition of Oscar Wilde’s poetry, we recommend Complete Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics). In November 1895, having spent a short time in Wandsworth prison, Wilde was moved to HM Prison, Reading to serve the rest of his two-year sentence of hard labour.īut Wilde’s poem was inspired not only by his own incarceration there, but by the execution of a soldier – the first at the prison for eighteen years – for the murder of his wife. We conclude this list with Wilde’s most famous poem. In this poem, which is a prime example of the luxurious indulgence of Decadent poetry, the narrator encounters the mysterious sphinx (‘half woman and half animal’: the sphinx being a cross between a woman and a cat) and, essentially, asks her some very personal questions about the lovers she’s had over the centuries.Ī fine example of fin de siècle decadence, and one of Wilde’s most intriguing poems. Wilde wrote on a number of occasions about sphinxes, with one of his characters describing women, memorably, as ‘sphinxes without secrets’. In a dim corner of my room for longer thanĪ beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me This poem, which addresses Persephone from the world of mythology, may not be the finest example of a villanelle, but it shows Wilde’s virtuosity in verse as well as, perhaps, highlighting the limits of his own verse. Wilde didn’t write hundreds of poems, but among the small number he did write we find sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, elegies, and many others – including this attempt at the restrictive and challenging form of the villanelle. In a separate post, we’ve compiled some of the best villanelles written in English, but we didn’t include this Wilde poem on the list. So begins this poem, an example of the villanelle form.
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