KAREN ALKALAY-GUTbecome known as Modernism. His poetry, however, is not quite so
confident. In "Helas!" the sonnet that he placed at the opening of Poems
(1881), the poetic voice at first exhibits a longing for the passive and yet
intense sensuous experience advocated by Pater. In many respects, the
poem echoes some of the more famous statements in Pater's "Conclusion"
to Studies in the History of the Renaissance: "A counted number of pulses
only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them
all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most
swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the
greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?" 29 Wilde's
poem opens by figuring this desire to explore the Paterian "finest senses"
through an image familiar to readers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry -
namely, the aeolian harp: "To drift with every passion till my soul / Is a
stringed lute on which all winds can play" (Of 1-2]. But by the end of the
poem, the poetic voice recalls the vengeful deity of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Echoing the Book of Samuel, where Jonathan breaks the holy fast and is
punished by death, Wilde seems to invoke his own punishment for
indulging in "every passion" (1): "I did but touch the honey of romance - /
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?" (13-14).
In his last poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), written after he
was released from two years of hard labor in solitary confinement for
committing acts of "gross indecency," Wilde's solution is no longer to
explore Pater's "finest senses" but to uphold the values of human sympathy.
Broken by the hypocritical society that first offered him fame and fortune
and then brutally withdrew the smallest tokens of humanity during his
1895 trials, Wilde's long poem concentrates on the urgent need for prison
reform. He dedicated The Ballad of Reading Gaol to a fellow prisoner,
Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who had been hanged for murdering his
spouse. The poem recounts the events that led to Wooldridge's execution
and the reactions of the prisoner to his fate. A trooper in the Royal Guards,
Wooldridge slit his spouse's throat three times with a razor. Since this was
obviously a premeditated crime, he was sentenced to death on 7 July 1896.
This was the second occasion that the scaffold at Reading Gaol had been
used since it was installed eighteen years before. If in some respects realistic,
Wilde's poem nonetheless invokes right from the start familiar aesthetic
and Decadent motifs. Its subject, of course, is death, and it draws on the
iconography of "wine and woman and song":
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,250