Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde Oscar

on! sing on!  I would be drunk with life,

         Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth,

      I would forget the wearying wasted strife,

         The riven veil, the Gorgon eyes of Truth,

      The prayerless vigil and the cry for prayer,

      The barren gifts, the lifted arms, the dull insensate air!

      Sing on! sing on!  O feathered Niobe,

         Thou canst make sorrow beautiful, and steal

      From joy its sweetest music, not as we

         Who by dead voiceless silence strive to heal

      Our too untented wounds, and do but keep

      Pain barricadoed in our hearts, and murder pillowed sleep.

      Sing louder yet, why must I still behold

         The wan white face of that deserted Christ,

      Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold,

         Whose smitten lips my lips so oft have kissed,

      And now in mute and marble misery

      Sits in his lone dishonoured House and weeps, perchance for me?

      O Memory cast down thy wreathèd shell!

         Break thy hoarse lute O sad Melpomene!

      O Sorrow, Sorrow keep thy cloistered cell

         Nor dim with tears this limpid Castaly!

      Cease, Philomel, thou dost the forest wrong

      To vex its sylvan quiet with such wild impassioned song!

      Cease, cease, or if ’t is anguish to be dumb

         Take from the pastoral thrush her simpler air,

      Whose jocund carelessness doth more become

         This English woodland than thy keen despair,

      Ah! cease and let the north wind bear thy lay

      Back to the rocky hills of Thrace, the stormy Daulian bay.

      A moment more, the startled leaves had stirred,

         Endymion would have passed across the mead

      Moonstruck with love, and this still Thames had heard

         Pan plash and paddle groping for some reed

      To lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid

      Who for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid.

      A moment more, the waking dove had cooed,

         The silver daughter of the silver sea

      With the fond gyves of clinging hands had wooed

         Her wanton from the chase, and Dryope

      Had thrust aside the branches of her oak

      To see the lusty gold-haired lad rein in his snorting yoke.

      A moment more, the trees had stooped to kiss

         Pale Daphne just awakening from the swoon

      Of tremulous laurels, lonely Salmacis

         Had bared his barren beauty to the moon,

      And through the vale with sad voluptuous smile

      Antinous had wandered, the red lotus of the Nile

      Down leaning from his black and clustering hair,

         To shade those slumberous eyelids’ caverned bliss,

      Or else on yonder grassy slope with bare

         High-tuniced limbs unravished Artemis

      Had bade her hounds give tongue, and roused the deer

      From his green ambuscade with shrill halloo and pricking spear.

      Lie still, lie still, O passionate heart, lie still!

         O Melancholy, fold thy raven wing!

      O sobbing Dryad, from thy hollow hill

         Come not with such despondent answering!

      No more thou wingèd Marsyas complain,

      Apollo loveth not to hear such troubled songs of pain!

      It was a dream, the glade is tenantless,

         No soft Ionian laughter moves the air,

      The Thames creeps on in sluggish leadenness,

         And from the copse left desolate and bare

      Fled is young Bacchus with his revelry,

      Yet still from Nuneham wood there comes that thrilling melody

      So sad, that one might think a human heart

         Brake in each separate note, a quality

      Which music sometimes has, being the Art

         Which is most nigh to tears and memory;

      Poor mourning Philomel, what dost thou fear?

      Thy sister doth not haunt these fields, Pandion is not here,

      Here is no cruel Lord with murderous blade,

         No woven web of bloody heraldries,

      But mossy dells for roving comrades made,

         Warm valleys where the tired student lies

      With half-shut book, and many a winding walk

      Where rustic lovers stray at eve in happy simple talk.

      The harmless rabbit gambols with its young

         Across the trampled towing-path, where late

      A troop of laughing boys in jostling throng

         Cheered with their noisy cries the racing eight;

      The gossamer, with ravelled silver threads,

      Works at its little loom, and from the dusky red-eaved sheds

      Of the lone Farm a flickering light shines out

         Where the swinked shepherd drives his bleating flock

      Back to their wattled sheep-cotes, a faint shout

         Comes from some Oxford boat at Sandford lock,

      And starts the moor-hen from the sedgy rill,

      And the dim lengthening shadows flit like swallows up the hill.

      The heron passes homeward to the mere,

         The blue mist creeps among the shivering trees,

      Gold world by world the silent stars appear,

         And like a blossom blown before the breeze

      A white moon drifts across the shimmering sky,

      Mute arbitress of all thy sad, thy rapturous threnody.

      She does not heed thee, wherefore should she heed,

         She knows Endymion is not far away;

      ’Tis I, ’tis I, whose soul is as the reed

         Which has no message of its own to play,

      So pipes another’s bidding, it is I,

      Drifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.

      Ah! the brown bird has ceased: one exquisite trill

         About the sombre woodland seems to cling

      Dying in music, else the air is still,

         So still that one might hear the bat’s small wing

      Wander and wheel above the pines, or tell

      Each