April soft and cold: Part of the mighty universal whole

Oscar Wilde was a giant of the literary set of the Gilded Age; the aesthetic movement practically was Wilde. These days he’s probably known more for his plays (I don’t suppose there’s an actor anywhere who hasn’t cut his/her teeth on The Importance of Being Ernest), fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray being the most famous, but I love his children’s stories, chief among them “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”), his scandalous life (which cost him dearly) and of course, his witticisms.

You want some acerbic riposte for a cocktail party? Wilde is your go-to-guy. If I could match him and Dorothy Parker in some kind of pay-per-view sarcasm slam, my financial future would be secured.

But Wilde also wrote poetry—yeah, not the best in the world, but still. The epic piece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was inspired by experiences while he was imprisoned for homosexuality. I personally find it grimmer than I want to deal with these days.

For all his flamboyant scandal-mongering, Wilde had an extremely well-developed moral compass, which is evident in both his fairy tales for children and his poetry. Try this one on for size.

“We Are Made One with What We Touch and See”

We are resolved into the supreme air,

We are made one with what we touch and see,

With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,

With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree

Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range

The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole

One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,

And mighty waves of single Being roll

From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part

Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,

One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. . . .

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth

Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,

The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth

At daybreak know a pleasure not less real

Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood

We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good. . . .

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,

Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,

That we are nature's heritors, and one

With every pulse of life that beats the air?

Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,

New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

And we two lovers shall not sit afar,

Critics of nature, but the joyous sea

Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star

Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be

Part of the mighty universal whole,

And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!

We shall be notes in that great Symphony

Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,

And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be

One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years

Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,

The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!