Page:Writings of Oscar Wilde - Volume 01.djvu/37

Rh With idle songs for pipe and virelay Which do but mar the secret of the whole.

Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul's inheritance?"

Here thus early is the genuine cry de profundis, the spiritual cry which is to be heard like an undertone of anguish in almost all Wilde's writings—


 * "And must I lose a soul's inheritance?"

How tragically it rings out, for example, in the closing lines of "the Sphinx"—a poem written while Wilde was still at Oxford, but not published till many years after—

"Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous
 * animal get hence!

You wake in me each bestial sense, you make
 * me what I would not be.

You make my creed a barren sham, you wake
 * foul dreams of sensual life,