Oscar Wilde Poem — Analyzed

In the first article in this series we saw how a handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde entitled ‘Ideal Love’ had come to light during a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow. No not at all but thank you for your interest

Wilde had signed and dedicated the poem to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his exile in Paris. But the poem was not new. Wilde had presented the same poem to a former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, eight years earlier as ‘The New Remorse’.¹ And four years before he met Douglas. he had already published it obscurely under the French title ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ (A Lover of Our Time) in the short-lived, literary magazine The Court and Society Review.²

Future articles in this series will examine each of these iterations to consider whether a poem of some literary interest has, in fact, more biographical significance. However, as the poem has received little scholarly analysis to date, it will be rewarding to first provide an exegesis of the text:

The sin was mine; I did not understand;

So now is music prisoned in her cave,

Save where some ebbing desultory wave

Frets with its restless whorls this meagre strand.

And in the withered hollow of this land

Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,

That hardly can the silver willow crave

One little blossom from keen Winter’s hand.

But who is that who cometh by the shore?

Nay, love, look up and wonder!
Who is this
That cometh in dyed garments from the South?

It is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss

The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,

And I shall weep and worship, as before.

THEME

The poem has an evocative theme of a passionate savior entering into an otherwise barren life, and it would be of Wildean interest for that reason alone. But its graphic conflation of religious and sensual allusions makes it more compelling.

FORM

Wilde adopts a variant form of the classical sonnet of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter divided into eight and six (octave and sestet).  It is a structure which often lends itself to the purpose that Wilde adopted, of proposition and resolution, in which the division marks a turn of thought or rhetorical shift.  

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

The opening four lines (or quatrain) are an admission of culpability, but the transgression is not framed simply as a human error: a spiritual tenor to the poem is insinuated at the outset in confessional language: ‘The sin was mine’.

It is natural to posit, as Neil McKenna does in his homoerotic reading³, that the sin implied is the mistake of the Wildes’ marriage; but it would be wrong to think this applies in every sense, because Oscar’s life and works gained much from Constance and the children whom he clearly loved. The sin is more likely to derive from what ‘I did not understand’. The resulting predicament of this misunderstanding is expressed in the metaphor of sea and shore, where music (perhaps representing joy or passion) is now imprisoned, to be visited only fleetingly, perhaps by an affair, to whirl ‘the meagre strand’. 

‘Strand’ in this sense is a poetic term for the water’s edge periodically covered and uncovered by the tide (its original definition), although the later meaning of ‘stranded’, of being left in a helpless state is, no doubt, implicit. Wilde often favored the figure of connecting loneliness to the shoreline, for instance in his poem ‘Humanitad’:

Back to the troubled waters of this shore
Where I am wrecked and stranded, even now.’⁴

The result of the author’s predicament is a feeling of being emotionally closeted, and if the mistake was not exclusively Wilde’s marriage itself, it is reasonable to infer a regret for the inevitability of its heterosexual course. The second quatrain extends the metaphor to the land to emphasize and expand the sense of wilderness. 

At this point in the sonnet the poetic change (volta) occurs. The importance of the moment for Wilde can be measured by his use of what was to become his ideal of a man supremely himself: that of the Christ-like figure. So we see in the sestet of the verse Wilde shifting his metaphor to a ‘new-found Lord’ in dyed garments; the Biblical allusion from Isaiah is clear: 

Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength?⁵

(This is Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose garments are dyed red, as if from treading grapes, but in reality from trampling the enemies of Zion.)

Wilde then switches his scriptural reference from the Old to the New Testament, (just as the crimson-stained figure in Isaiah has been identified by some scholars with the suffering Christ) with: ‘It is thy new-found Lord.’ This is an echo of the words spoken by ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ (John) when he saw the risen Christ from a fishing boat on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias: ‘It is the Lord.’⁶

But who is this new-found Lord who was to bring salvation? And if the Wildes’ marriage was more sin than sacrament, whose sin was it? Indeed, in whose voice is the poem written?

VOICE

The key difficulty in answering these questions lies in identifying the voices of the protagonists: the ‘I’ and ‘thee’ of the sestet.

For the poem’s resolution, Wilde creates a dialogue between the two entities in a construction that conforms naturally to the traditional form of two balanced tercets (of three lines). First the question ‘who is this?’ and then the response which identifies salvation in the form of a male figure.

If the poem is about the marriage, there are two possible scenarios. The first would be that the poem is in the voice of Wilde’s wife, Constance, and it is she who ‘did not understand’, in which case her use of ‘thy’ would identify for Oscar a male savior, leaving her to weep and worship as before. I am not persuaded by this interpretation as it unlikely that Wilde would write the poem in the third person and, moreover, attach blame to Constance (‘the sin was mine’). Conversely, if the poem is in Oscar’s voice, it follows that he is suggesting ‘thy’ new-found lord to be a savior for Constance, to kiss her unravished mouth. I find this reading equally unconvincing because the poem would more likely be about Wilde’s own torment than Constance’s plight, never mind that Constance was by then hardly unravished. So if both of these scenarios are unlikely one might doubt whether Constance is indicated at all — indeed, if she were, why would Wilde consider it befitting to rededicate the poem twice more to male friends?

A more credible construal could be that Wilde’s expression is solely internal. It would not be the first time Wilde had enjoined his soul in verse—for example, he does so in his early poem ‘Theoretikos’ when his offended sensibilities exhort him to leave his homeland. In this hypothesis Wilde would be addressing his own love instinct (‘Nay, love, look up and wonder’) and his symbolism would consecrate the secret self.

While the poem would remain chronological with Wilde’s troubled marriage, the perspective now would be coincident with Robert Ross’s stay of several months in Tite Street in 1887, and the likely time of Wilde’s ‘Swan & Edgar moment’ when he went shopping with Constance and saw the rent boys soliciting on the pavement in Piccadilly Circus. ‘Something clutched at my heart like ice.’⁷ In other words, the poem came at the point of Wilde’s self-realisation. We are reminded of Wilde’s epigram placing the sinner as counterpoint to the saint, with the redemption that the sinner has a future.⁸ And any Christ-like savior in this sense would chime intriguingly with what Wilde said in De Profundis, that ‘one always thinks of him [Christ] as a young bridegroom’ whose entire life was ‘the most wonderful of poems’.⁹

TREADING CAREFULLY

Ultimately, however, it may be wise to remain open-minded about any interpretation in the light of Wilde’s views on artists retaining the mask of mystery. Besides, being essentially Wildean, the poem may be leading a double life. We know that Wilde often cast his meaning as ostensibly heterosexual when his subtext was homoerotic, so perhaps he knew all along that the poem would serve all purposes. 

Whatever the poetic abstraction, the reality for Wilde was that no meaningful savior was forthcoming when he wrote the poem in 1887. He may have found refuge in affairs that whirled the meagre strand, but it would be another four years before he met the love of his life. Significantly, it was at that moment when Wilde revisited the poem by gifting it to Lord Alfred Douglas; and, as we now know, another eight years later when Wilde regifted the poem to Christian Gauss.

These gestures, together with the poem’s original conception, support the idea that at the very least the sonnet heralds a moment of seduction into a new romantic era.

© John Cooper. 2024.

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VARIORUM

In the interests of literary completeness, it is worth recording that three versions differ from the other two in a few small ways. First, there are grammatical errata of ‘shall’ for ‘will’ and ‘who’ for ‘that’ (see below):

DIFFERENCES IN THE TEXT OF THE THREE VERSIONS
Line	1887	1892	1899
	‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ in The Court and Society Review	‘The New Remorse’ in The Spirit Lamp	‘Ideal Love’ (MS only)
4	whirls the	whirls this	whorls the
7	silver	silver leaden	silver
8	little	silver	little
9	that cometh	who cometh	that cometh
10	brackets	brackets	no brackets
11	that cometh with	who cometh in	that cometh in
14	will weep	shall weep	shall weep

Perhaps of more variorum interest is Wilde’s editorial process with the words silver (line 7) and little (line 8). In drafting the text for Douglas, Wilde mistakenly wrote silver for both these words. Then, upon realising the word silver appeared twice, he amended the draft by changing the first silver to leaden. What he should have done, to correspond with the other version, was change the second silver to little.

We know of these changes because in 2013 the surviving manuscript was found in the library of the noted Pre-Raphaelite collector Laurence W. Hodson as his collection was being prepared for auction.¹⁰ Wilde literally had rewritten the poem for Douglas¹¹—see below.

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NEXT: THREE TIMES TRIED

It was not unusual for Wilde to inscribe copies of his books, nor occasionally to transcribe manuscript fragments of his sayings. What is surprising in this case is that Wilde would present a personally dedicated holograph of a full sonnet with such an intimate meaning for a second time to a different person. I believe the poem is unique in this respect.

It will be valuable, therefore, in this series to examine each of the poem’s three iterations to consider whether a poem of some literary interest has, in fact, more biographical significance.

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* With thanks to Robert Whelan, editor of The Wildean, and its anonymous peer reviewers, who assisted with the original article.

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Footnotes:

1. Douglas published the poem as ‘The New Remorse on the front page of the undergraduate magazine ‘The Spirt Lamp’ in December 1892—the first issue that he edited. ↩︎
2. Mason, 23 ↩︎
3. McKenna, 85–8 ↩︎
4. ‘Humanitad’ lines 141-2 in Wilde (2000) 90. The use of ‘strand’ in the figurative sense of abandonment is first recorded in Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837). [Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, 1988.] In Oscar’s Books, 161,Thomas Wright informs us that Wilde could recite whole passages of Carlyle’s French Revolution by heart. ↩︎
5. Isaiah 63:1 ↩︎
6. John, 21:7 ↩︎
7. Wilde recounted this to Reginald Turner who wrote about it in a letter to A. J. A. Symons, 26 August 1935. (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library & Ellmann, 258) ↩︎
8. ‘The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.’ A Woman of No Importance (1893), Act III. ↩︎
9. From ‘De Profundis’ in Holland & Hart-Davis, 743 & 742 ↩︎
10. Books, Manuscripts and Artwork from the Collection of Laurence W. Hodson (1864-1933). Bloomsbury Auctions, 2013. ↩︎
11. Wilde (2000) 299. The version in Complete Works: Poems is the text of The Spirit Lamp version of the poem, listing variants in The Court and Society Review. The existence of the third version, addressed to Christian Gauss, was unknown at the time. ↩︎

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Works Cited In This Series

Joseph Bristow (2022) ‘Hyacinthe Adoré: The Spirit Lamp and Male Homoerotic Culture’, The Wildean, 60, January 2022, 37-60

Anya Clayworth (2004) Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Rupert Croft-Cooke (1963) Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies, London: W. H. Allen

Alfred Douglas (1929) The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, London: Martin Secker

Richard Ellmann (1987) Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton

Nicholas Frankel (2014) ‘A New Poem by Christina Rossetti’, Notes and Queries, Volume 259, Number 1, March 2014, 92–95

Christian Gauss (1934) A Primer for Tomorrow: Being an Introduction to Contemporary Civilisation, New York and London: Charles Scribner and Sons

Josephine Guy (1998) ‘Self-plagiarism, Creativity and Craftmanship in Oscar Wilde’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 41, no. 1 (2005) ‘Oscar Wilde’s “Self Plagiarism”: Some New Manuscript Evidence’, Notes and Queries, December 2005, 485-8 

George S. Hellmann (1952) ‘An Early Poem by Dean Gauss’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 4, summer 1952, 195-7

Merlin Holland (2011) ‘A Blatant Attempt to Sensationalise’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 15-17

Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, London: Fourth Estate

Katherine Gauss Jackson and Hiram Haydn(1957) The Papers of Christian Gauss, New York: Random House

Neil McKenna (2003) The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, London: Century

Gregory Mackie (2019) Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife, Toronto: Toronto University Press

J. Robert Maguire(2013) Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker and the Dreyfus Affair, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stuart Mason (Christopher Sclater Millard) (1914) Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London: T. Werner Laurie

Donald Mead (2011) ‘Oscar Wilde, Alsager Vian and The Court and Society Review’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 6-14

Jeffrey Meyers (2003) Edmund Wilson, A Biography, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin

A Murray (2016) ‘The Dance of Death: Fitzgerald and Decadence’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, 387-411.

Ruth Robbins (2011) Oscar Wilde, India: Bloomsbury Academic

Matthew Sturgis (2018) Oscar: A Life, London: Head of Zeus

Oscar Wilde (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Volume 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Edmund Wilson (1952) ‘Portrait: Christian Gauss’, The American Scholar, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1952) 345-55

Thomas Wright (2008) Oscar’s Books, London: Chatto & Windus

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the perspectives and information offered during discussion of these articles by Nicholas Frankel, Michael Seeney, and Mark Samuels Lasner. With thanks to Robert Whelan, editor of The Wildean, and the helpful textual suggestions of its anonymous peer reviewers, who assisted with the original article.

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