I remember a lady telling me once that she was in a London shop one day when Wilde came in and asked as a favour that a lily be taken out of the window because it looked so tired. This looking on flowers as real live sentient things was no mere pose with him. He was thoroughly imbued with the conviction that they were possessed of feeling, and throughout his poetical work we shall find endless applications of this idea.
Of particular interest in this poem are the verses descriptive of the various poets, his contemporaries. Swinburne he alludes to most happily, as far as the neatness of phrase is concerned nothing could be better in this regard than
"And he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine
And sung the Galilean's requiem."
William Morris, "our sweet and simple Chaucer's child," appeals to him strangely. Many a summer's day he informs us he has "lain poring on the dreamy tales his fancy weaves." His appreciation of Morris's verse is keen and enthusiastic.
"The little laugh of water falling down
Is not so musical, the clammy gold
Close hoarded in the tiny waxen town
Has less of sweetness in it."
What a delicate metaphor that is, what an exquisite poet's fancy. Not Keats himself could have surpassed the "clammy gold close hoarded in the tiny waxen town"—it is worthy to rank with some of the daintiest flights in the "Queen Mab speech," that modern Mercutios murder so abominably.
Like every verse writer of his time Oscar Wilde had felt the wondrous influence of Rossetti, and no finer tribute to the painter could be written than the lines—
"All the World for him
A gorgeous coloured vestiture must wear,
And Sorrow take a purple diadem,
Or else be no more Sorrow, and Despair
Gild its own thorns, and Pain, like Adon, be
Even in Anguish beautiful; such is the empery which Painters held."
There is a stately splendour about the flow of "a gorgeous coloured vestiture," and one pauses to admire the choice of the last word, and can picture the poet's delight when, like an artist in mosaic who has hit upon the stone to fill up the remaining interstice, he lighted on the word. It is essentially le mot juste, no other could have filled its place. So also is there a peculiar happiness in the use of "empery." There is a volume of sound and meaning in the word that could with difficulty be surpassed.
In fact, in his choice of words Wilde always and for ever deserves the glowing words of praise that Baudelaire addressed to Theodore de Bonville—