![]() 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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