WHICH POEMS DID Speranza recite to her son? Perhaps she began with those she knew best: her own. The young Wilde was intimately familiar with his mother’s verse: in his first surviving letter, written when he was fourteen, he asks Speranza to send him a magazine containing one of her poems. Four years earlier she had dedicated an edition of her verses to ‘my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde’. ‘I made them indeed’, she declares in the dedication, ‘Speak plain the word COUNTRY. I taught them, no doubt / That a country’s a thing one should die for at need.’1
Speranza’s poems are patriotic, grandiloquent and sometimes inflammatory. She also commanded a quieter power, penning conventional Romantic verses, but Wilde preferred her in fiery political mode. His favourite poems were her ballad on the trial and execution of the Sheares Brothers in 1798 for having ‘sought to free their land from thrall of stranger [i.e. the British]’, and her passionate verses on what her son called ‘our unfortunately unsuccessful [Nationalist] rebellion of’48’.2 He read both poems, ‘with much effect and feeling’, during a lecture he gave in America in 1882.
In that lecture, Wilde also quoted from, or mentioned, many of the other Irish poets he had grown up with as a boy. These included Samuel Ferguson, the author of lovely lyrics on mythological themes, Thomas Moore, whose melodies ‘were made to be sung by beautiful Irish maids to beautiful Irish music,’3 and the most famous patriotic poets of the middle of the century, Clarence Mangan and Thomas Davis. It was Davis – the leader of the Young Ireland movement, which campaigned for the repeal of the English Union – who had first inspired Speranza to take up her pen. His poetry, and that of his Nationalist contemporaries had, Wilde said, ‘kept alive the flames of patriotism in the hearts of the Irish people’.4*
Speranza’s taste in English and American poetry was modern and Romantic; Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Longfellow and Wordsworth were the poetic gods of her idolatry. Wilde was heir to her taste and, in his youth, he favoured Romantic over Classical verse. Even in his later years he would remark that there were two ways of disliking poetry: one was to dislike it, the other was to like Alexander Pope. His preference for Romantic verse is hardly surprising, given his delight in the music, emotiveness and magical potency of poetry, along with his fascination with the ancient figure of the Bard.
Speranza passed on to her son many of her predilections. He delighted in the work of her great heroine, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, hailing her as the greatest poetess since Sappho and ranking her Aurora Leigh alongside Hamlet and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Barrett Browning’s masterpiece is an impassioned and delightfully rambling autobiographical poem, concerning a woman’s struggle to find the intellectual, physical and social space in which to write. ‘So much do I love it,’ Wilde later told William Ward, an Oxford friend to whom he gave the volume as a gift, ‘that I hated the idea of sending it to you without marking a few passages I felt you would well appreciate – and I found myself marking the whole book.’6
Wilde’s book gift has survived.7 In its margins he provided Ward with a running commentary. Next to a passage on Puritanism he wrote: ‘read all this delightfully satirical’;8 alongside a frightening description of an old woman he scribbled the word ‘terrible’. In the letter that accompanied the present Wilde praised the poem’s sincerity, calling it ‘one of those books that, written straight from the heart – and from such a large heart too – never weary one’.9 His notes testify to the appropriately earnest mood in which he read it. He marks touching passages on love, emotionally charged sections on women’s fight for independence, and passionate lines on the sacred role of the poet in modern society.10 Barrett Browning describes the ardour with which she reads her favourite poets: ‘We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge / Soul-forward, headlong’. This captures the spirit in which Wilde perused her poem, so it is fitting that he marked the lines.
Wilde inherited his mother’s profound admiration for Tennyson. He was beguiled by the melodious music of the Poet Laureate, and regarded him as the apotheosis of a specifically English tradition whose earlier exemplars included Chaucer and Spenser. This tradition was, he said, characterised by a ‘sympathy with passion’, a fondness for ‘sensuous imagery as opposed to ideas’, and by its joyous celebration of ‘the variety of life’.11 It is possible that Speranza read to her son from the 1858 edition of Tennyson’s Poems that later found a place on the shelves of Wilde’s Tite Street library.12 This little quarto volume, which contains poems such as ‘The Lotos Eaters’, ‘Locksley Hall’ (Speranza’s favourite) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, had a special provenance: it was inscribed to her by the Scottish author Carlyle. As she, in turn, passed it on to her son, it may serve as a symbol of the poetic legacy she bestowed upon him.13
Just as Speranza famously banned the word ‘respectable’ from the parties she hosted at Merrion Square, she displayed scant concern for a poet’s moral ‘respectability’. She allowed, and indeed probably encouraged, her son to read Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, two poets regarded as scandalous in Victorian England, because of the frankly pagan character of their ‘fleshy’ verse. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads contains breathless poems sung with ‘lips full of lust and of laughter’ in which the poet cries out to be filled with pleasure ‘Till pain come in turn’. Wilde was ravished by the book’s ‘very perfect and very poisonous’ verses,14 the first in English literature, he claimed, to ‘sing divinely the song of the flesh’.15 He would, he declared years later, rather have written Poems and Ballads than any other book.
Wilde loved the ‘artistic completeness of the workmanship’ of Rossetti’s verses which, he said, affect one ‘like a deferred resolution in Beethoven’. He admired the poet’s genius for drawing ‘the quintessential music out of words’.16 Once again, it was the ‘sweet and precious melodies’ of the poems that appealed to Wilde, just as it was surely the delicious music of the following lines that made them especially dear to him:
The cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring;
The rosebud’s blush that leaves it as it grows
Into the full-eyed fair unblushing rose;
The summer clouds that visit every wing17
Wilde was greatly impressed, by the ‘strength and splendour’ of Rossetti’s ‘dominant personality’. ‘Personality’ was one of the qualities he looked for in verse, along with ‘perfection’ of craftsman ship. These attributes were exquisitely blended in the writings of the favourite poet of his youth, John Keats, the ‘god-like boy’, whom he placed alongside Shakespeare and the Greeks in his poetic pantheon.18 In fact, when Wilde later came to compile a list of books he advised the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette to ‘re-read’, Keats was the only poet he included.* To Wilde, Keats was a master among minstrels, a sacred ‘Priest of Beauty’. When he later visited the poet’s grave (which he called ‘the holiest place in Rome’) he was so overwhelmed that he prostrated himself upon it.
Wilde would come to see Keats as the presiding spirit of his own early poetry, in which he often echoes the Bard of Hampstead. When he was particularly satisfied with one of his own poetic efforts, Wilde would say that even his ‘dear friend’ Keats had approved of it. This reverence would endure into adulthood when he purchased some of Keats’s letters at an auction. He also owned the manuscript of Keats’s ‘Sonnet in Blue’, which he proudly displayed in the drawing-room at Tite Street. ‘I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand,’ Wilde wrote, ‘and the ink that did his bidding, [I have] grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery’.19
Another poet the young Wilde loved, ‘as one should love all things, not wisely but too well’20, was Shakespeare. We do not know the precise moment the boy entered the fiery-coloured world of the Bard’s plays, nor can we identify the specific volume that provided a portal into it. Speranza may have read to him from the 1833 edition of Shakespeare’s works contained in Sir William’s library, or perhaps she used the three-volume illustrated Cassell edition that later formed part of Wilde’s adult library.21
The nineteenth-century child often started with the Lambs’ famous Tales from Shakespeare, or other prose versions of the plays, before moving on to the expurgated editions that had been produced by editors such as the American Thomas Bowdler, which excised or altered Shakespeare’s salacious passages. Children were then ready to encounter the plays in their pristine form. As Rossetti passed through all of these phases before the age of seven, it is probable that Wilde was introduced to Shakespeare before his seventh year. While it is possible that Wilde began with the Lambs’ Tales, it is highly unlikely that his parents inflicted a Bowdlerised Shakespeare on him.
Whatever door young Wilde used to enter the Shakespearean universe, the experience must have been an intense one. He found him self in the middle of that field of electrifying energy, in which every idea, emotion, style and character, is balanced by its opposite, and in which the possibilities of thought and life seem infinite. It is a world made out of all-powerful, magical and rhythmical words that would have acted on Wilde like intoxicating music. The encounter marked him for life, burning Shakespeare’s words indelibly into his memory. He knew many of the plays so well that, in later years, he could identify even the slightest misquotation when he saw them performed on the stage.
In adulthood Wilde recalled his passionate boyhood affair with literature: he had loved it, he remarked, ‘to excess.’22 A childhood and adolescent ardour for poetry was common among writers in the nineteenth century. The poet Francis Thompson, an acquaintance of Wilde’s, remembered being ‘overwhelmed by feelings of which he knew not the meaning’ at the age of seven on first encountering Shakespeare and Coleridge. Another of Wilde’s friends, Edmund Gosse, ‘listened, as if to a nightingale’, during his boyhood, to the Latin of Virgil. Although it was incomprehensible to his child’s ears, it revealed to him ‘the incalculable beauty that could exist in the sound of verses’, and the wonder of poetry ‘took hold of his heart forever’.23
The experience of falling in love with poetry was one of the most important of Wilde’s life, and not only in terms of literature. It convinced him that the poet was ‘the supreme artist . . . lord over life and all arts’,24 and it stirred within him the ambition to be a Bard. The exact moment Wilde dedicated himself, with vows, to poetry, is unknown to us, but it is pleasant to imagine it having occurred during one of Speranza’s recitations. At any rate, Wilde later said that it was his mother who inspired him to write verse.25 Speranza would be involved at every stage of its production too, annotating his early efforts, some of which were penned in notebooks that belonged to her. When his poems first appeared in magazines she compiled a scrapbook of them, and frequently offered her enthusiastic criticisms. Of ‘Magdalen Walks’ she wrote: ‘the last lines have a bold, true thought, bravely uttered . . . I recognise you at once . . . there is Oscar!’26 When Wilde won the prestigious Newdigate poetry prize for Ravenna (1878) at Oxford she was even more effusive. ‘Oh Gloria, Gloria! . . . we have genius!’ she wrote to her darling boy, ‘you have got honour and recognition – and this at only 22 [he was actually 23] is a grand thing.’27
* Many of the poets Wilde referred to in his lecture can be placed in the ancient Irish Bardic tradition. The verses of Moore and Mangan are wonderfully melodic; other authors consciously drew on Irish folklore and mythology for inspiration. Aubrey de Vere, whom Wilde also mentioned in the lecture, consciously attempted to revive the ancient Bardic tradition in poems such as ‘Inisfail’, which Wilde was certainly familiar with.5
* Wilde’s list of ‘Books to re-read’, along with his suggestions for ‘Books to read’ and ‘Books not to read’ offers a succinct statement of his readerly taste. It is reproduced in Appendix I of this book (see pp. 317–8).