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?"
Here thus early is the genuine cry de profundis, the spiritual cry which is to be heard like an undertone of anguish in almost all Wilde's writings—
- "And must I lose a soul's inheritance?"
How tragically it rings out, for example, in the closing lines of "the Sphinx"—a poem written while Wilde was still at Oxford, but not published till many years after—
"Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous
animal get hence!
You wake in me each bestial sense, you make
me what I would not be.
You make my creed a barren sham, you wake
foul dreams of sensual life,
