Oscar Wilde
A new day, as we consider the works of Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900), Irish poet and playwright, who in the late Nineteenth Century became one of the most popular playwrights in London.
He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts, imprisonment (from May 25 1895 to May 18, 1897), and early death at age 46.
Wilde’s literary works include: “The Happy Prince and Other Stories” (1888, fairy stories); “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories” (1891, stories);“A House of Pomegranates” (1891, fairy stories); and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891 novel).
His theatrical plays include: “Lady Windermere's Fan” (1892); “A Woman of No Importance” (1893); “An Ideal Husband” (1898; and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1898).
Other works include “De Profundis” (written in prison 1897); and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898, poem).
A broken man, Wilde died of meningitis at the age of 46 on November 30, 1900. He is buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
Wilde is known mainly for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his plays, however, he was also a poet—here is one of his poems and a quote for your consideration:
Her Voice
The wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily-cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,—
It shall be, I said, for eternity
‘Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done.
Love’s web is spun.
Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway in the summer air,
Here n the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.
Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,—
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbor in some bay,
And so we may.
And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,—you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you.
--Oscar Wilde
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“there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest