Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
WITH THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
Twelfth Edition
This collection of Wilde’s Poems contains the volume of 1881 in its entirety , ‘ The Sphinx ’, ‘ The Ballad of Reading Gaol ,’ and ‘ Ravenna .’ Of the Uncollected Poems published in the Uniform Edition of 1908, a few , including the Translations from the Greek and the Polish , are omitted . Two new poems , ‘ Désespoir ’ and ‘ Pan ,’ which I have recently discovered in manuscript , are now printed for the first time . Particulars as to the original publication of each poem will be found in ‘ A Bibliography of the Poems of Oscar Wilde ,’ by Stuart Mason , London 1907.
Robert Ross .
To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all 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 ?
Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,— But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother—! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things.