The Sphinx

by Oscar Wilde

THIS 10 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Best Known Works of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 076613010X.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Merihan Al Fiqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

ممتعه جدا فى الترام الصبح قبل المحاضره

[Rina · Rating 5 out of 5]

And with your curved archaic smile you watched his passion come and go.

I kinda never got around to update and rate this one despite having read it in January, so here I go.

Reading this poem left me flabbergasted. Like. I literally. Cannot. Believe. I knew Wilde’s prose is the most exquisite thing ever. I knew his one-liners in comedies are hilarious. But I had never read any poetry by Wilde and just this one poem almost had me convinced that his poetry might be even more beautiful than his prose. Which really shouldn’t be possible.

You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the hornèd god your own
You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.

I adored the rhyme scheme. I simply adored it, it was so cleverly done, and I cannot fathom how on earth he managed to keep it up for seven pages and still produce such exquisite poetry. The middle of one line always rhymed with the end of the other line and vice versa. If you look at popular music today, some people do not even manage to rhyme two lines with each other, despite the chorus consisting of literally just those two lines.

The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure of his eyes.

Every second word was my favourite. I had started out underlining the lines I liked and very quickly realised that I’d be underlining about 90 per cent of the poem. It is just that good.

Get hence, you loathsome Mystery! Hideous animal, get hence!
You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.

[Edition chosen for the accurate page count compared to where I read it in because Collected Works editions stress me out - part 4 (I think)]

[Courtland · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The wording gives images of places that are decorated as finely as the gold-leafed pages of the printing... The way the words flow, and feel in your mouth is like eating a bite of French cheese cheesecake. For those that don't know that is super soft moist cake with layers of cheesecake moose and white chocolate. It is overly indulgent and more than a bite is hard to stomach. The words of the poem feel rich, and smooth in your mouth as you read, almost as if they dissolve seamlessly in your mouth as the next word begins. The references tickle your brain while the rest of your senses are spun into a whirlwind of decadence that is just this side of too indulgent, like the cake."- said by a fellow classmate

[jessica]

the rhyme scheme fucks, but unfortunately i cannot read

[John Yelverton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Schizophrenic would be an apt word to describe this poem which in one stanza praises the sphinx and in another stanza curses it.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely gorgeous poem. Reminds me also, oddly, of 'The Wood Sprite' by Nabokov.

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Wilde’s plays, but this is my first attempt at reading his poetry. The poem is beautiful and very Wildean, with vivid imagery, intricate wording and rhymes. I enjoyed it greatly.

[Ur mom (Mari) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Who were your lovers, who were they Who wrestled for you in the dust? Which was the vessel of your Lust, What Leman had you every day?”

[darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dawn follows dawn and nights grow old and all the while this curious cat
Lies couching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with gold.

I have a particular fondness for the Aesthetic movement within Victorian literature. I love it for its obfuscation and its pretension, its absolute decadence. I love it for being unapologetically subversive. I love it for refusing to answer the many questions it sets alight in me. And no figure within that movement has achieved the same cultural prominence as Oscar Wilde.

Wilde holds a special place in my heart. The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of my first classics, and I spent an entire semester analyzing The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis for an online salon that included, among other things, a full recitation of the former.

This semester, I had the opportunity to read one of Wilde's lesser-known works. He spent twenty years writing The Sphinx, beginning during his time at Oxford and eventually publishing it in 1892. Wilde considered the poem one of his greatest works, and it's been called an essential piece of fin-de-siecle art.

Read my the rest of my thoughts on my Book Log.

[Sananab · Rating 2 out of 5]

5/5 for the illustrations. I have mixed feelings about the poem. Some parts I liked.