Oscar Wilde Poem — Video

The above appraisal is from a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow and features a handwritten document by Oscar Wilde dating from 1899 which had recently come to light.¹

The item is a single page containing a complete manuscript sonnet, which Wilde also signed and dedicated to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his post-prison exile in Paris.

Everything we know about the document, from the visual evidence and provenance of its inherited ownership, to accounts of Wilde’s encounters with Gauss and other gifts he made to him, attests to its authenticity.

While the document represents a newly discovered Wilde manuscript, it does not present us with a newly discovered Wilde poem. Anyone familiar with Wilde’s poetry, or who knows the paucity of his output during his exile, would not be too surprised to learn that the poem he gave to Gauss in 1899 was not exactly making its debut.

Wilde’s penchant for benign self-plagiarism² was always in evidence even during his creative period, but during his desperate last few years recycling had become a crutch. A few months earlier, he had been distressed to learn from his friend (and future literary executor), Robert Ross, that he had begun reusing old excuses for needing money.³ And more seriously, he attempted to gain support from different friends by rehearsing the scenario of the same play—which Frank Harris eventually adopted and wrote up as Mr and Mrs Daventry. Accordingly, the Antiques Roadshow acknowledged that when Wilde presented the poem to Gauss it was not new.

But the appraiser was only partly correct in asserting that Wilde had previously written the poem as ‘The New Remorse’ for Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891. It would be more accurate to say that Wilde had re-written it for Douglas on that occasion. This is because Wilde had already published the same poem four years before he met Douglas in the short-lived, literary magazine The Court and Society Review under a French title ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ (A Lover of Our Time).

So that when Wilde presented the poem to Gauss in 1899, it was making its third appearance under a third title—it was now called ‘Ideal Love’ and it reads:

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.

The sonnet 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 is compelling—so it is surprising that the poem has received little scholarly analysis to date.

Therefore, given its elusive quality, it may be rewarding to provide an exegesis of the text. This is the subject of the next article in this series which can be found at the following link:

Wilde’s Manuscript Poem — Analyzed

© John Cooper. 2024.

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articles in this series

1. A handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde appears on the Antiques Roadshow,
2. A critical analysis of the poem.
3. Three Times Tried—I: The poem’s first appearance as Un Amant De Nos Jours.
4. Three Times Tried—II: The poem’s second appearance as The New Remorse.

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Footnotes:

1. PBS episode aired on 8 August 2015 (Charleston, SC). ↩︎
2. According to Guy (1998, 8): ‘Self-plagiarism appears throughout Wilde’s career. Indeed it seems habitual, perhaps even part of some design.’ Guy illustrates the way in which Wilde would recycle jokes, epigrams and aphorisms, polishing and refining them, but also slightly altering them to fit into new contexts. See also Mackie (2018). ↩︎
3. Holland & Hart-Davis, 1102 ↩︎

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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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