No More Learning

Ah! cruel tree! if I were you,
And children climbed me, for their sake
Though it be winter I would break
Into spring blossoms white and blue!



PAN
DOUBLE VILLANELLE


I.

O GOAT-FOOT God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?

No more the shepherd lads in glee
Throw apples at thy wattled fold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!

Nor through the laurels can one see
Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold
And what remains to us of thee?

And dull and dead our Thames would be,
For here the winds are chill and cold,
O goat-loot God of Arcady!

Then keep the tomb of Helice,
Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,
And what remains to us of thee?

Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?

II.

AH, leave the hills of Arcady,
Thy satyrs and their wanton play,
This modern world hath need of thee.

No nymph or Faun indeed have we,
For Faun and nymph are old and grey,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!

This is the land where liberty
Lit grave-browed Milton on his way,
This modern world hath need of thee!

A land of ancient chivalry
Where gentle Sidney saw the day,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!

This fierce sea-lion of the sea,
This England lacks some stronger lay,
This modern world hath need of thee!

Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee!



IN THE FOREST


OUT of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!

He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!

O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!



SYMPHONY IN YELLOW


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 moored 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.




SONNETS


HELAS!


TO drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which can winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance--
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?



TO MILTON


MILTON! I think thy spirit hath passed away
From these white cliffs and high-embattled towers;
This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey,
And the age changed unto a mimic play
Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours:
For all our pomp and pageantry and powers
We are but fit to delve the common clay,
Seeing this little isle on which we stand,
This England, this sea-lion of the sea,
By ignorant demagogues is held in fee,
Who love her not: Dear God! is this the land
Which bare a triple empire in her hand
When Cromwell spake the word Democracy!



ON THE MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS IN BULGARIA


CHRIST, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!



HOLY WEEK AT GENOA


I WANDERED through Scoglietto's far retreat,
The oranges on each o'erhanging spray
Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the day;
Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet
Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet
Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay:
And the curved waves that streaked the great green bay
Laughed i' the sun, and life seemed very sweet.
Outside the young boy-priest passed singing clear,
'Jesus the son of Mary has been slain,
O come and fill His sepulchre with flowers. '
Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours
Had drowned all memory of Thy bitter pain,
The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers and the Spear.



URBS SACRA AETERNA


ROME! what a scroll of History thine has been;
In the first days thy sword republican
Ruled the whole world for many an age's span:
Then of the peoples wert thou royal Queen,
Till in thy streets the bearded Goth was seen;
And now upon thy walls the breezes fan
(Ah, city crowned by God, discrowned by man! )
The hated flag of red and white and green.
When was thy glory! when in search for power
Thine eagles flew to greet the double sun,
And the wild nations shuddered at thy rod?
Nay, but thy glory tarried for this hour,
When pilgrims kneel before the Holy One,
The prisoned shepherd of the Church of God.
MONTRE MARIO



E TENEBRIS


COME down, O Christ, and help me! reach Thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on Thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
'He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height. '
Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.



AT VERONA


HOW steep the stairs within King's houses are
For exile-wearied feet as mine to tread,
And O how salt and bitter is the bread
Which falls from this Hound's table,--better far
That I had died in the red ways of war,
Or that the gate of Florence bare my head,
Than to live thus, by all things comraded
Which seek the essence of my soul to mar.

'Curse God and die: what better hope than this?
He hath forgotten thee in all the bliss
Of his gold city, and eternal day'--
Nay peace: behind my prison's blinded bars
I do possess what none can take away,
My love and all the glory of the stars.



ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS' LOVE LETTERS


THESE are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant's price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet's heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God's wonder, or His woe?



THE NEW REMORSE


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 whirls this meagre strand.
And in the withered hollow of this land
Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,
That hardly can the leaden willow crave
One silver blossom from keen Winter's hand.

But who is this who cometh by the shore?
(Nay, love, look up and wonder! ) Who is this
Who 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.




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? The Project Gutenberg eBook, De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www. gutenberg. org





Title: De Profundis


Author: Oscar Wilde



Release Date: April 13, 2007 [eBook #921]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DE PROFUNDIS***





Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf. org. Note that later editions of De Profundis contained
more material. The most complete editions are still in copyright in the
U. S. A.





DE PROFUNDIS


. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time
itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one
centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance
of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and
drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to
the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes
each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to
communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose
existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers
bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the
vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or
strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and
moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the
light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small
iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is
always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.
And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion
is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or
can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-
morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of
why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and my
mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death
was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in
which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had
bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in
literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of
my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name
eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged
it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make
it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.
What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper
to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I
should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was,
all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of
so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me
from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known
me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote
to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me.
. . .

Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that
hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written
upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in
fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is
nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not
vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of
tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see
is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but
that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in
pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise
what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and
natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison
to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long
dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and
simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,
handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven
for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode
of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or
stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single
word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment
whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it
in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that
I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept
sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been
profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of
those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my
mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed
for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and
brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to
understand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meant
so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will
realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . .

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we
are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a
casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of
one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the
phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love
in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison
makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air
and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome
when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our
very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are
broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are
denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring
balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . .

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small
can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am
trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment.
This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible
as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more
terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my
age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and
had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position
in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually
discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long
after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was
different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a
symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its
weariness of passion.