Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde

Name: Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde
Author: Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

Pages: about 42
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 46 min at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 26 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

IT is thought that a selection from Oscar Wilde’s early verses may be of interest to a large public at present familiar only with the always popular Ballad of Reading Gaol, also included in this volume. The poems were first collected by their author when he was twenty-sex years old, and though never, until recently, well received by the critics, have survived the test of NINE editions. Readers will be able to make for themselves the obvious and striking contrasts between these first and last phases of Oscar Wilde’s literary activity. The intervening period was devoted almost entirely to dramas, prose, fiction, essays, and criticism.
IN MEMORIAM C. T. W. Sometimes trooper of The Royal Horse Guards Obiit H.M. Prison Reading, Berkshire July 7th, 1896
HE did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men In a suit of shabby grey; A cricket cap was on his head, And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain, Within another ring, And was wondering if the man had done A great or little thing, When a voice behind me whispered low, ‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
Dear Christ! the very prison walls Suddenly seemed to reel, And the sky above my head became Like a casque of scorching steel; And, though I was a soul in pain, My pain I could not feel.

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Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde

From the opening

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