Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

OSCAR WILDE

Poems 1892

Wilde's Poems first appeared in 1881, and went into five editions by the end of 1882. Heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne and Whistler, they helped establish the personality of dandy and aesthete which he deployed at home and abroad in the succeeding years. For this edition, published in the year of Lady Windermere’s Fan, there are new title and half-title pages by Charles Ricketts. It reasserts the impression of earlier editions, of poetry aspiring to the condition of painting.

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The sea is flecked with bars of grey.
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.

Etched clear upon the pallid sand
Lies the black boat: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.

And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.

(‘Les Silhouettes’, page 143)

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Poetry of the 1890s