TÆDIUM VITÆ
To stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear
This paltry age's gaudy livery,
To let each base hand filch my treasury,
To mesh my soul within a woman's hair,
And be mere Fortune's lackeyed groom,--I swear
I love it not! these things are less to me
Than the thin foam that frets upon the sea,
Less than the thistle-down of summer air
Which hath no seed: better to stand aloof
Far from these slanderous fools who mock my life
Knowing me not, better the lowliest roof
Fit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,
Than to go back to that hoarse cave of strife
Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.
Sonnet To Liberty
Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,--
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,--
And give my rage a brother----! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved--and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.
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Recommended books:
- Complete Works of Oscar Wilde : Stories, Plays, Poems and Essays
Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland (Designer) ; Paperback, 1989
- Complete Poetry
Oscar Wilde, Isobel Murray (Editor) / Paperback / Published 1999
- The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics)
Oscar Wilde, Peter Raby (Editor) / Paperback / Published 1998