That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine."
This is simply learning put in for its own sake by the young scholar delighting in his knowledge of antiquity. The line that I have printed in italics is no more than a riddle whose answer is Venus, sometimes called Erycina (Erycina ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx. Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the spirit of beauty (Venus) now shamefully neglected. He delighted in such riddles and disguised references, and they certainly helped his less cultured readers to feel that in reading him they were intimate with more poetry than they had read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last example, he says, addressing the nightingale:—
"Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood!
If ever thou didst soothe with melody
One of that little clan, that brotherhood
Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany
More than the perfect sun of Raphael
And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well."
Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method of referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his ingenuity that we are reminded of the defects of that school of verse that Johnson called the metaphysical, whose virtues are too generally forgotten. He hears the wind in the trees as Palæstrina playing the organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day. With half an echo of Browning he describes a pike as "some mitred old bishop in partibus," and, with a true seventeenth-century conceit, speaks of the early rose as "that sweet repentance of the thorny briar."