Page:Writings of Oscar Wilde - Volume 01.djvu/35

Rh The volume was full of echoes, as the volumes of all young poets are sure to be, echoes of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Matthew Arnold, as well as of Swinburne and William Morris,—but, as one reads the young book again to-day, one has to admit that they were such fine and forceful echoes as can only be made by an original talent. All poets, great or small, more or less echo each other—that is what we call the poetical tradition!—and we could hardly afford to lose such an echo, if echo it be, as that noble sonnet (Wilde wrote some of the best sonnets of his time) to "Liberty," with its poignant close, foreshadowing the seriousness of his essay on "The Soul of Man under Socialism"—

"Those Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things."

Then "Ave Imperatrix," and "Panthea," in which, so to say, the pantheistic immortality of the body is expressed with such rare beauty—

"So when men bury us beneath the yew,
 * Thy crimson-stainèd mouth a rose will be,

And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with
 * dew,