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Oscar Wilde
Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664133199
Table of Contents
ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS’ LOVE LETTERS
WITH A COPY OF ‘A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES’
POEMS
HÉLAS!
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?
ELEUTHERIA
SONNET TO LIBERTY
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