Three Times Tried—II

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The New Remorse

Fourth in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

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Previous 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.

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In this article we shall look at the second appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1892.

As had been the case with its first publication, five years earlier in The Court and Society Review, it was Wilde’s probable intention for the sentiment to herald a new romantic interest.

On this occasion, the poem reemerged shortly after he met his preeminent male paramour Lord Alfred Douglas—who was to become Wilde’s lover and a consequential influence over his life, work, and eventual fate—indeed the poem was republished by Douglas himself not long after Wilde had presented it to him.

In 1892 Alfred Douglas had taken over editorship of the undergraduate magazine The Spirt Lamp and he placed a poem on page 1 of the first issue that he edited (December 6, 1892).¹

The title had now become ‘The New Remorse’.

This alternative title signaling a new remorse adds to the elusive quality of the poem. This new title suggests that Wilde recognised in his sacred vision that all passing is shaded by remorse for what has been lost. A simple explanation supporting this idea can be provided by the superficial Wilde story: that his old remorse derived from moving on from his wife, Constance, perhaps to Robert Ross—generally regarded to be his first homosexual encounter—and that his new remorse was in moving on again to Douglas. ,

Douglas, however, did not have the benefit of such a retrospective because he thought the poem had been written specifically for him. We know that Douglas was unaware of the original iteration of the poem, not only when he received it but even as late as 1929 when he recounted in his Autobiography that, six months after they met in 1891, Wilde presented him with a copy of a poem. He explains: ‘He wrote a sonnet to me, and gave it to me at dinner one night in a restaurant.’² He identified it as one from the Methuen edition beginning ‘The sin was mine, I did not understand’, which, of course, is the same poem.³

Douglas can be forgiven for thinking he was the original subject of the verse because the ‘unravished roses of thy mouth’ accorded all too familiarly with Wilde’s fateful description of those ‘red rose-leaf lips of yours…made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses’;⁴ and besides, he literally was a new-found Lord.

Wilde knew, of course, that he had impunity with this conceit because it would not have been easy in those days to know of a poem that had been published in a newspaper five years earlier, particularly one now defunct. Croft-Cooke in his biography Bosie asserts that Douglas thought the sonnet was Wilde’s best (see supplement below ‘Oscar Wilde’s Best Sonnet’) and he believed until the end of his life it was written for him⁵—despite the original poem having been reprinted in Mason in 1914. Again, in his Autobiography, Douglas reinforces his mistaken belief by applying the poem’s meaning to their relationship to demonstrate that ‘familiarities’ between himself and Wilde ‘had not then begun’ six months into their friendship — presumably referring to the mouth yet unravished.

The point of all this is that, if Douglas thought the poem had been written for him, it follows that Wilde must have allowed him to believe it.

This suggests that Wilde may have regarded the verse not only as a romantic ornament but also as a tool of seduction. Douglas probably thought so, for he labors the subject of ‘familiarities’ by confirming that they did eventually begin: ‘about nine months after I first met Oscar Wilde as a result of a long, patient and strenuous siege on his part’.⁶

Siege or not, Douglas thought enough of the poem, or of Wilde, by then to put it on the first page of The Spirit Lamp when he became editor, no doubt using it to further the homoerotic orientation he gave the magazine.⁷

Wilde and Douglas continued their close relationship until Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895.

After prison, despite a failed attempt to live together in Naples, it was never the same, and their relationship lacked any sexual dimension. Douglas concluded his account of ‘familiarities’ with Wilde by saying that they: ‘…never resumed after he came out of prison. Wilde always claimed his love for me was ideal.’⁸ It is apposite, therefore, that on its third iteration an unrequited Wilde chose to rename the poem ‘Ideal Love’.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. Bristow, 41 ↩︎
2. Douglas, 75; the autobiography was retitled for the American market as My Friendship with Oscar Wilde (1932) ↩︎
3. Note 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 versions, was change the second silver to little. ↩︎
4. Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, [? January 1893] in Holland & Hart-Davis, 544 ↩︎
5. Croft-Cooke, 66 ↩︎
6. Douglas, 75; Croft-Cooke, 54 ↩︎
7. As described in Bristow, The Wildean 60 ↩︎
8. Douglas, 618 ↩︎

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SUPPLEMENT: Oscar Wilde’s best sonnet

Bearing out Douglas’s high opinion about the poem (noted in the text) the following is his recollected transcription of it, with a few lapses, that he made much later and headed ‘Oscar Wilde’s Best Sonnet’.

With many thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Maier-Sigrist, the noted Wilde bibliographer of Wilde’s manuscripts, for bringing this to my attention.

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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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