An undated early manuscript, reproduced from a facsimile printed in “Stuart Mason” [Christopher Millard], Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, incorporating Wilde’s cartoons of gowned academics and scampering children, as well as draft rhymes for some of the poem’s couplets. Fong and Beckson use the nature of the cartoon to date the poem’s composition to Wilde’s Oxford years. The sheet containing alternate rhymes shows Wilde’s concern for what he later termed the “plastic form” of words (“The Critic As Artist,” 354). As is evident too from Robert Sherard’s biographical memoir of the poem’s composition (see Afterword), rhyme was of primary importance to Wilde in the composition not only of The Sphinx but of all poetry. As Wilde was to write in 1890, four years before publishing The Sphinx, rhyme is “that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice,…which in the hands of a real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of gods,… [is] the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre” (“The Critic As Artist” 345). Two years earlier, upon explaining why the poet W. E. Henley had “abdicated half his power” by rejecting rhyme and embracing free verse, Wilde had written as follows:

Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all the arts is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it will whisper, as a French critic as said, “things unexpected and charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,” and bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty. (“A Note On Some Modern Poets,” 91)

Figure 1: Reproduced from “Stuart Mason” [Christopher Millard], Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), pp. 396-97.

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This work is licensed by Nicholas Frankel under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.

Last edited by Ben Allen on Apr 9, 2010 9:38 pm -0500.