The Hemlock to Oscar
J Seymour MacNicely
Mall_ . . .
There are essays on every subject from Yeats and Keats, Swinburne and
Whitman, even to no less than two singing of his delight in the
writings and carrying's on of his "Great Lady," George Sand.
What's more, a real curiosity is here to be found in something he
penned under title of POETRY AND PRISON, as published in the Pall Mall
Gazette, January 3, 1889, some six years before his own plummeting
descent into the darkly Dantesque climes of Reading Gaol, 1895.
And how very poetic of Justice, if not prophetic of Wilde that he
should be found musing over such matters as . . .
"Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet
[busted in 1888 as a conspirator in the cause of the Irish rebellion].
The Love Sonnets of Proteus, in spite of their clever Musset-like
modernities and their swift brilliant wit, were but affected or
fantastic at best. They were simply the records of passing moods and
moments, of which some were sad and others sweet, and not a few
shameful. Their subject was not of high or serious import. They
contained much that was wilful and weak.
"In Vinculis, upon the other hand, is a book that stirs one by its
fine sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned thought, its
depth and ardour of intense feeling. 'Imprisonment,' says Mr. Blunt in
his preface, 'is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern
soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence. Like a
sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul
emerges from it stronger and more self-contained.'"
[Yet how tragic if Wilde, taking inspiration from Blunt, quite falsely
imagined he was made of the same stern stuff as this expatriate fellow
Irishman of a North African horse-trader. But how damnably sad, that
when being in face of the same fate; even as his own family came to
him like the friends of Socrates, pleading with him to flee, instead
he stayed, not heeding their advice nor availing himself of their aid,
to be getting off in exile to France--where he wound up anyway
terminally broken in the end. But had it been this poetry which
emboldened him to stand and take a punishment he'd not been made to
bear? And what if it were indeed the verse of Wilfred Blunt which
served the deadly draught of hemlock to the dearer poet, Oscar Wilde?]
"To him, certainly, it has been a mode of purification. The opening
sonnets, composed in the bleak cell of Galway Gaol, and written down
on the flyleaves of the prisoner's prayer-book, are full of things
nobly conceived and nobly uttered, and show that though Mr. Balfour
may enforce 'plain living' by his prison regulations, he cannot
prevent 'high thinking' or in any way limit or constrain the freedom
of a man's soul.
They are, of course, intensely personal in expression. They could not
fail to be so. But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty
or ignoble about it. The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was
the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be
found here. In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce
rage and flame-like passion. Such a sonnet as the following comes out
of the very fire of heart and brain [one can hardly fail in the
context to think of the _Pisan Chronicles_ of Ezra Pound]:
God knows, ’twas not with a fore-reasoned plan
I left the easeful dwellings of my peace,
And sought this combat with ungodly Man,
And ceaseless still through years that do not cease
Have warred with Powers and Principalities.
My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,
Was as a sister diligent to please
And loving all, and most the human clan.
God knows it. And He knows how the world’s tears
Touched me. And He is witness of my wrath,
How it was kindled against murderers
Who slew for gold, and how upon their path
I met them. Since which day the World in arms
Strikes at my life with angers and alarms."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30191/30191-h/30191-h.htm
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JM http://doo-dads.blogspot.com