An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moved against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
A slight enough thing, but full of interest and spirit. Your man
who loses himself in verse based on legendary lore or mysticism,
understands and enjoys that. It means something to him. For the same
reason Wilde’s _Ballad of Reading Gaol_ interests and excites, almost
like an adventure story, combining simplicity and beauty in a way that
is altogether satisfying. Mark how a concrete image is called up by a
short descriptive passage.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
“_That fellow’s got to swing_.”
And mark the dramatic appeal of this:
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman’s hands were near.
But why he said so strange a thing
No warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher’s doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.
He gets very close there to the heart of the common man, as close as
James Stephens indeed, with his _What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub_.
The truth of the matter is that under pain, the artificial Wilde
vanished and his poetry became something other than pretence and
artifice. I say that, because Douglas has told us that up to the time
of his imprisonment, Wilde had “held that style was everything, and
feeling nothing; that poetry should be removed as well from material
actuality as from the actuality of the spirit, and that no great poet
had ever in his greatest moments been other than sincere.” (Page 209,
Oscar Wilde and Myself.) And of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, Douglas
writes, “(in it) we have a sustained poem of sublimated actuality and
of a breadth and sweep and poignancy such as had never before been
attained in this line. The emotional appeal is ... quite legitimate and
... the established tradition as to what is fitting and comely in a
poem of this nature is not outraged or transgressed.”
Another great poem grew out of his prison life. I refer to the long
letter, made into a book by Mr. Ross and entitled _De Profundis_, for a
poem, a prose poem, it is. It would be better to mention in this place
that _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not composed until Wilde had
left prison. _De Profundis_, however, was written within stone walls.
In another place quotation has been made of Blunt’s Diaries in which
Ross is quoted as having said that it is impossible to tell how much
of _De Profundis_ is sincere repentance, and how much the result of
self pity. Be that as it may, it is very certain that the spirit of the
man was bitter in his solitude, that his egoism fell away from him at
times. But it is absurd to expect that punishment and imprisonment and
disgrace could change the man himself. If he had that feminine soul, he
had it. It was part of him, and he could not get away from it, prison
or no prison. But he could know in his own heart that he was not as
he should have liked to be, that his life’s ideal was other than his
life’s path. In other words, he realized, as we all realize, that
while his eyes were fixed on the stars, his feet were firmly planted in
the mud, and for that fact he was very sorry indeed. Not only sorry,
but rebellious that things were as they were, and, as Wilde said, the
mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the
air of heaven. The mood rebellious and the mood penitential cannot sit
side by side in the same heart. Penitence presupposes submission and
gratitude for gifts bestowed, and Wilde felt no gratitude to the fates
that had, at his birth, dropped into his veins the one drop of black
blood which colored his life. Destiny is omnipotent, and destiny had
given Wilde the feminine soul. Doubtless, had Wilde been what he wished
to be, in his better moments, he would have sat with august divinities.
But neither Wilde, nor you, nor I, have it in our powers to command the
winds that would waft us to the Islands of the Blest.