OSCAR WILDE’S

PROSE POEMS
The Short Forms of Oscar Wilde,19/10/2022
 The Storyteller
“Wilde did not converse: he narrated.” (Gide, In Memoriam, 26). André Gide, among other friends of Wilde,
praised his memorable talent as a storyteller . Following in the footsteps of his Irish parents, who both
published collections of folk tales (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 589–91), Wilde loved to tell stories in the form of
parables, inspired by Irish folklore (Wilde and Guillot de Saix, Le chant du Cygne, 220), as well as Greek
mythology and the Bible, as a first step towards writing his own work. As Arthur Ransome observes in one of
the first biographies on Wilde, Oscar Wilde. A Critical Study (1912), “he talked less to say than to make”
A. Gide (Ransome, 207).

William Butler Yeats also underlined Wilde’s storytelling talents: “when I remember him with pleasure it is
always the talker I remember … Behind his words was the whole power of his intellect” (Yeats, quoted in
Toomey 406)

W. B. Yeats
Testing-Ground Stories, Tailored to Audiences
The tales and parables he told his audience
varied depending on who was listening to him,
and he often tested out orally the material he
was planning to use in his writings, whether for
his prose fiction, his essays, or his plays.
Narrating before Writing: the Example of The
Picture of Dorian Gray
In “Wilde’s Fictions”, a chapter in The Cambridge
Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997), Jerusha McCormack
notes that these oral parables “are the kernels from which
the larger fictions grow: such as The Picture of Dorian
Gray, which is little more than a literary elaboration of
such a slight, but pregnant, tale” (McCormack 101). The
tale to which McCormack refers could be “L’Art et
l’Amour” (Wilde and Guillot de Saix, Le Chant du Cygne,
235–37) where an actress loses interest in the stage after
falling in love; or “L’Amour et la Mort” (ibid. 237–41),
the story of a painter who becomes obsessed with a
masked lady and dies when he discovers a laughing skull
under the mask.
Le Chant du Cygne. Contes parlés d’Oscar
Wilde
Although she offers a well-informed analysis of Wilde’s oral tales and
parables, McCormack regrets that “a full collection is still to be made”
(McCormack 101). Such a collection does exist, however, but it may have
escaped Anglophone critics, as it is only available in a French edition from
1942. In Le Chant du Cygne. Contes parlés d’Oscar Wilde (1942) , the French
writer and critic Léon Guillot de Saix (1885-1964), collected some of these
tales from Wilde’s audience and wrote them down in French. He structures the
book around three main parts, whose titles, he claims, were chosen by Wilde: I.
“La Vérité du Mensonge”, II. “L’Évangile de Minuit”, and III. “L’Auberge des
Songes”, which collect respectively tales based on classic mythology,
reworkings of the Gospels and a more heteroclite mix of stories inspired by
folk and medieval tales. The editor adds an introduction entitled “Le Dormeur
éveillé (Témoignages)” which gives a sense of Wilde’s storytelling sessions
through recollections from his friends, as well as a final chapter entitled “Le
Jeu des variantes” which includes some variants of the tales transcribed in the
main parts.
Re-telling Myths and the Bible – in Music
◦ Guillot de Saix tries to remain close to what the stories must have been like: short tales of one to two pages often based on
well-known Greek or biblical legends which, however, end with unexpected twists contrived by Wilde. As Prof. Toomey
observes, “Wilde respects the morphology of the original tale but inverts the ‘moral’; the ‘fault’ ends his tale, rather than is its
occasion” (Toomey 417). McCormack underlines that Wilde’s wish to end his stories with a surprising turn meant to challenge
and provoke: “as Wilde intended, his prose poems have the status of parables. They aim to overturn; they proceed as precise,
almost mechanical, inversions of the audience’s expectations. Their form is oral, with a cadencing of perfect music”
(McCormack 101).
 Wilde’s Musical Storytelling
◦ Guillot de Saix points out how his transcription will never do justice to Wilde’s oral tales which aspired to the condition of
music as, in his Oxford mentor Walter Pater’s words, “the typical, or ideally consummate art” (Pater 27) :
◦ Mais on n’y trouvera que des mots sur des mots. Il y manquera pour jamais la musique, car le langage, a dit Wilde, a besoin d’être accordé comme un
violon, et, de même que quelques vibrations de plus ou de moins dans la voix du chanteur ou dans le frisson de la corde feront émettre une fausse note,
de même le sens plus ou moins exact des mots peut défigurer le message. (Wilde and Guillot de Saix 41).

◦ In his influential book, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (first published in 1873 and revised in 1888), Walter Pater
(1839-1894), famously argued that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (Pater 27). He explains that “it
is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal,
consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they
inhere in and completely saturate each other, and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be
supposed constantly to tend and aspire” (Pater 28–29).
Musical Language and Theatricality

◦ Because music was central to Wilde’s conception of storytelling, and despite a few indications about his pronunciation in the
collection, the French transcriber, translator, and editor of Wilde’s storytelling, Guillot de Saix, admits that he cannot but fail
to reproduce Wilde’s performance of his tales in book form. Thus alluding to the theatrical quality of Wilde’s storytelling. As
Prof. D. Toomey observes in a 1994 article, “gesture, and the somatic element are vital in oral cultures and related to the
physicality of the story-telling mode” (Toomey 410). Wilde’s unique tone and diction was supported by gestures and a posture
that further dramatized the performance.
Guillot de Saix’s Informers
Guillot de Saix did not receive these tales directly from Wilde, but mostly from French writers and artists who knew and heard
the Irish playwright tell his stories in French during his many Parisian stays. He got in touch with other friends of Wilde’s, such
the painter Léonard Sarluis and the author Jacques Daurelle, and he read many testimonies by André Gide, Henry D. Davray,
Charles Ricketts, and Lord Alfred Douglas among others. These various sources helped Guillot de Saix in his efforts to collect
Wilde’s oral tales, before either transcribing or translating them into French depending on how he got access to the stories.
From Storytelling to Prose Poetry
◦ Some oral tales were published in written form, as
prose poems, by Wilde himself. “The House of
Judgement” was published in The Spirit Lamp, an
Oxford magazine edited by Lord Alfred Douglas, who
was to become Oscar Wilde’s lover, first in February
1893 and “The Disciple” appeared in the June 1893
edition. Then “The Artist”, “The Doer of Good”, “The
Disciple,” “The Master,” “The House of Judgment,”
and “The Teacher of Wisdom” all appeared under the
general title “Poems in Prose” in The Fortnightly
Review, in July 1894.
◦ The metaphor of language as a musical instrument
would also guide Wilde’s adaptations of his oral tales
into prose poems.
The Prose Poem and Wilde’s Prose Poems
◦ The genre of the prose poem was popularised by Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, also known as Petits Poèmes en
prose (first published in 1869). John Sloan explains that “although Wilde is generally believed to have been influenced by
Baudelaire in his choice of the genre of the prose poem, his prose poems differ substantially in style and subject matter from
Baudelaire’s. Typically, Baudelaire’s prose poems are subjective in tone and contemporary and urban in setting. Wilde’s, by
contrast, are simple in style and archaic in subject matter” (Sloan, Oscar Wilde, “Introduction” xxvii).
◦ Their simplicity of style is, however, paired with archaisms evoking the authorised King James translation of the Bible.
 Aiming at Moral Endings – Against
Conventional Morals
◦ Wilde’s wish to end his stories with a surprising turn meant to challenge and provoke. He intended his prose poems to have the
status of parables. They aim to overturn; they proceed as precise, almost mechanical, inversions of the audience’s
expectations. Their form is oral, with a cadencing of perfect music” (McCormack 101).
 The Prose Poem and the Strategy of Inversion
◦ The genre of the prose poem which Wilde adopted when he wrote six of these tales for publication participates in this strategy
of inversion. In her entry for The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Mary Ann Caws underlines first the
genre’s “oxymoronic title and its form based on contradiction” (Caws, para.1) and she adds that “in the [prose poem] a field of
vision is represented, sometimes mimetically and often pictorially, only to be, on occasion, cut off abruptly; emotion is
contracted under the force of ellipsis, so deepened and made dense” (Caws, para.2).
◦ On the next slide, some more definitions…
 The Prose Poem: Definitions
◦ “The best short definition is almost tautological. The prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. On the page it can look
like a paragraph or fragmented short story, but it acts like a poem. It works in sentences rather than lines. With the one exception of the
line-break, it can make use of all the strategies and tactics of poetry. Just as free verse did away with meter and rhyme, the prose poem
does away with the line as the unit of composition. It uses the means of prose toward the ends of poetry.” David Lehman, “The Prose
Poem: An Alternative to Verse,” The American Poetry Review, MARCH/APRIL 2003, Vol. 32, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 2003), pp. 45-49.
◦ "A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction." Russell Edson (American poet, novelist,
writer, and illustrator).
◦ "The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does." Charles Simic
(editor of the Paris Review).
◦ “The prose poem is an inherently subversive genre, one that must perpetually undermine prosaic conventions in order to
validate itself as authentically "other". At the same time, each prose poem must to some degree suggest a traditional prose genre
in order to subvert it successfully. The prose poem is thus of special interest as a genre in which the traditional and the new are
brought inevitably and continually into conflict.” Margaret Murphy, A tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from
Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.)
 The Myth of Narcissus
John William Waterhouse, Narcissus The Myth

◦ Narcissus was a very handsome youth, but wholly

inaccessible to the feeling of love. The nymph Echo,
who loved him, but in vain, died away with grief. One
of his rejected lovers, however, prayed to Nemesis to
punish him for his unfeeling heart. Nemesis accordingly
caused Narcissus to see his own face reflected in the
clear waters of a forest pool, and to fall in love with his
own image. As this shadow was unapproachable
Narcissus gradually perished with love, and his corpse
was metamorphosed into the flower called after him
narcissus. This story is related at length by Ovid.
Oscar Wilde’s Prose Poem, “THE DISCIPLE”

◦ When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came
weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.
◦ And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green
tresses of heir hair and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so
beautiful was he.'
◦ 'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.
◦ 'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on
your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.'
◦ And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his
eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'
 THE ARTIST

◦ ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of the pleasure that abideth for a moment. And he went
forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze.
◦ But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere in the whole world was there any bronze to be found,
save only the bronze of the image of the sorrow that endureth for ever.
◦ Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in
life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign
of the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was
no other bronze save the bronze of this image.
◦ And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire.
◦ And out of the bronze of the image of the sorrow that endureth for ever he fashioned an image of the pleasure that abideth for
a moment.