Made for the luring and the love of man!"
There is much in the poem itself that inclines me to trust Mr. Sherard's memory of its date.
It is work more personal to Wilde than anything in Poems. The firm mastery of its technique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof that it was written after The Duchess of Padua if it were not known that Wilde spent some time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot alter the whole texture of a poem, and The Sphinx is full of those decorative effects that are rare in his very early work and give to much of his matured writing its most noticeable quality. No one has suggested that it was written later than 1883, so that we must explain the extraordinary advance that it shows on The Duchess of Padua as one of those curious phenomena known to most artists: it often happens that, in turning from one kind of work to another, as from dramatic writing to poetry, men come quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and better editions of themselves.
The kinetic base, the obvious framework, of The Sphinx is an apostrophe addressed by a student to a Sphinx that lies in his room, perhaps a dream, perhaps a paperweight, an apostrophe that consists in the enumeration of her possible lovers, and the final selection of one of them as her supposed choice. It is a series rather than a whole, though an effect of form and cumulative weight is given to it by a carefully preserved monotony. In a firm, lava-like verse, the Sphinx's paramours are stiffened to a bas-relief. The water-horse, the griffon, the hawk-faced god, the mighty limbs of Ammon, are formed into a frieze of reverie; they do not collaborate in a picture, but are left behind as the dream goes on. It goes on, perhaps, just a little too long. So do some of the finest rituals; and The Sphinx is among the rare incantations in our language. It is a piece of black magic. Of the student who saw such things men might well say:—
"Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,"
but they could never continue:—
"For he on honey-dew hath fed,"
and, with whatever milk he had been nourished, they would be certain that it was not that of Paradise.