Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed. (OWi-6)

Here the death of the unnamed woman not only differs from the events
described in newspaper reports but also involves a careful stylization. The
solider removes the uniform that would mechanize and negate the indivi-
dual passion central to this murder; he kills her in a romanticized environ-
ment; and he mixes blood and wine as if partaking in a ritual communion.
To connect his uniform with the blood and wine, we are led to believe that
Wooldridge was a redcoat (although his military unit wore blue). More-
over, the ballad combines wine and women in a manner that even Wilde's
contemporaries thought was artificial. English soldiers were known to
drink beer or gin, not red wine. But here the recollection of "wine and
woman and song" attempts to make a real murder part of an identifiable
literary tradition. As more detailed readings of the poem suggest, we might
begin to wonder if Wilde's Ballad - with its focus on the mental and
physical torture of human beings - is condemning aestheticism rather than
murder as a crime. 30

Wilde's Irish contemporary, Yeats, escaped the fate of the "tragic genera-
tion" because he outlived them all. But his early poetry bears resemblances
to many of the characteristics we have seen in aesthetic and Decadent
poetry. "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (1899), for example, evokes
the kind of passivity and self-degradation that we discover in Dowson's
villanelle. In the opening lines, its pattern of imagery also recalls the rich
colors and textures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's and Morris's works:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. (WBY 1-8)

The artificiality of "heavens' embroidered cloths" envelops the first five
lines in a pseudo-medieval world of courtly love. But the last three lines
move into an entirely different dimension. To be sure, the identifiably Pre-
Raphaelite environment of "golden and silver light" seems lush and
attractive. But Yeats's speaker claims to be "poor," having only the world
of the self and its aspirations. No less Romantic than the various "cloths,"
the unadorned world of "dreams" is presented as a more real, if vulnerable,
poetic offering. There is also an obligation placed on the silent woman of

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