In Bohemia: A Masque

The fifth and final article of my Three Times Tried series featured the third appearance in 1899 of a sonnet by Oscar Wilde. On this occasion he presented it to a young man named Christian Frederick Gauss, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, who would eventually become Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton.

We saw how Gauss had incorporated his meetings with Wilde into a striking work titled In Bohemia: A Masque, first published in the literary monthly East and West in June 1900.

As the previous article only featured selections of the poem, it is worth presenting it in full here separately, for the record.

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Introduction

The poem is an allegorical fantasy of three characters in a drinking establishment: The Muse, The Poet, and A Voice.

The scene replicates Gauss’s café experiences with Wilde in which Gauss (as Wilde’s new Muse) exhorts the Poet to abandon his dissipation and return to writing. The Wildean parallels in the narrative are unmistakeable.

Textually, Gauss pays homage to Wilde’s poetry (see example in footnote 1). Further, and throughout the poem, Gauss also uses uncommon words and names such as mandragore, asphodel, ambrosial, Mitylene, Endymion, Calypso and Sphinx, all of which appear in Wilde but rarely, if at all, together elsewhere.

Intriguing, too, is that after returning from Paris in 1900 Gauss adopted the Wildean nom de plume of Sebastian de L’Isle, recalling Wilde’s Parisian alias of Sebastian Melmoth.

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—The Poem—

In Bohemia: A Masque
By Christian Frederick Gauss

SCENE: A tavern.

THE MUSE. THE POET. A VOICE.

THE MUSE
Shame, Poet, at thy tavern table, wake!
It is my wonted hour, mine,—thy Muse.
Hast thou forgot the time when we did use
To walk together through the quiet night?
It is the hour; away, the lingering light
Is mingled with the darkness, haste, ah take
My hand and let us forth again,— For shame!

THE POET
Thy words are idle; nay, not any more
Canst thou seduce me with the charm of dreams;
Thou shalt not find me any more the same.
I am aweary of the fading gleams;
Better to-night the sleepy mandragore
And balm of nodding poppies, than thy smile;
Thy voice to me is as the wash of seas
Ulysses heard, recalling treacheries
Of fond Calypso and the fatal Isle.

A VOICE
Gathered gold of rainbows makes
Never cloth-of-gold,
Fondest heart of lover breaks
When the truth is told,
And the songless bird forsakes
Autumn woods grown cold.

THE MUSE
Nay, Poet, nay, I pity thee; ah, come.
This tavern surely cannot be the home
Of one who dared the sheer, steep heights of song;
It is a phantasy; thy fevered brain
Is dizzied; come, thou shalt be healed again;
I’ll lead thee forth where thou shalt all forget;
A journey perilous it is, yea long
And difficult thereto the narrow way;
Yet on those heights what wonder! There the day
Begins; the velvet asphodel is wet
With dews ambrosial, and the singers gone
Chant on those heights forever;— Come!

THE POET
What wonder on those storied heights, indeed!
I am aweary of that wonder,— I;
Come change thy lure, ’tis the world’s tragedy
That the Sphinx smiles forever; creed
After foolish creed, age after age,
Have broken ’gainst her feet of stone, for meed
Their dust is whirled about the desert. Sage,
Poet, clown and captain, tempted, fall,
And he who solved the riddle, what of him?
Another wrote that tragedy.— ’Tis all.
Better for me the noise and life, the dim,
Bleared candle-light of vile cafés;

Better for me the smoke of cigarette
Chasèd by drunken voices,— the grisette
Lolling her ribald song, than wasted days,
Your heights of wonder, promised crown of bays.¹

THE MUSE
Nay, Poet, nay, thou hast not understood;
Their name is written in the Book of Life
Who charmed the world with song; the noise, the strife
Boot not at all, this fever of the blood.
Thy soul must hunger still for peace; so come,
Come take my hand and I will lead thee home;
Leave this low tavern where the air is hot
And follow me into the realms of light;
The moon, that perfumed flower of the night
Sways in her cloudy gardens, and the grot
Of fair Endymion to-night we’ll find;
The arcane beauty of the gods long dead,
Your eyes shall see; the spiced Egean wind
That dizzied Sappho as she sat and sang
Upon the lonely cliffs of Mitylene
Shall fill your nostrils. Yea, all things unseen,
All marvels past of man and God, the clang
Of arms forgot on immemorial fields,
Strange victories misnamed defeats;— the yields
Of all the ages do I hold; upon
Their waiting glory shall your heart be fed,
By me from all things all the veils be drawn.

THE POET
Ah, temptress, I am weary of thy song;
And yet — the fruitless nights all overlong,
The barren days, are empty of delight.
At thy low voice somehow old dreams revive,
I hear dead voices calling, a strange light
Falls over faded faces and I strive
With days long gone to their dim western home.—
Passionless temptress, thy hand again,— I come!
(He takes her hand; the lights fade.)

A VOICE
(In the distance, scarcely audible.)
Gathered gold of rainbows makes
Never cloth-of-gold,
Fondest heart of lover breaks
When the truth is told,
And the songless bird forsakes
Autumn woods grown cold.

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© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnote:

1. Compare this verse of Gauss’s with one of Wilde’s own:
   I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
   I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better than the poet’s crown of bays. ↩︎

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