Oscar Wilde
Whole text
- p.791
- Sweet, I blame you not, for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay
I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day. - From the wildness of my wasted passion I had struck a better, clearer song,
Lit some lighter light of freer freedom, battled with some Hydra-headed wrong. - Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed,
You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and enamelled mead. - I had trod the road which Dante treading saw the suns of seven circles shine,
Ay! perchance had seen the heavens opening, as they opened to the Florentine. - And the mighty nations would have crowned me, who am crownless now and without name,
And some orient dawn had found me kneeling on the threshold of the House of Fame. - I had sat within that marble circle where the oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey, and the lyre's strings are ever strung. - Keats had lifted up his hymenaeal curls from out the poppy-seeded wine,
With ambrosial mouth had kissed my forehead, clasped the hand of noble love in mine. - And at springtide, when the apple-blossoms brush the burnished bosom of the dove,
Two young lovers lying in an orchard would have read the story of our love. p.792 - Would have read the legend of my passion, known the bitter secret of my heart,
Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as we two are fated now to part. - For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by the cankerworm of truth
And no hand can gather up the fallen withered of the rose of petals youth. - Yet I am not sorry that I loved you—ah! what else had I a boy to do,—
For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the silent-footed years pursue. - Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past,
Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death a silent pilot comes at last. - And within the grave there is no pleasure, for the blind-worm battens on the root,
And Desire shudders into ashes, and the tree of Passion bears no fruit. - Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God's own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheraean rising like an argent lily from the sea. - I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's crown of bays.
ΓΛΥΚΙΠΙΚΡΩΣ ΗΡΩΣ
Flower of Love
Document details
The TEI Header
File description
Title statement
Title (uniform, ): ΓΛΥΚΙΠΙΚΡΩΣ ΗΡΩΣ
Title (translation, English Translation): Flower of Love
Author: Oscar Wilde
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by: Margaret Lantry
Funded by: University College, Cork
Edition statement
1. First draft, revised and corrected.
Extent: 1395 words
Publication statement
Publisher: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork
Address: College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt
Date: 1997
Date: 2009
Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
CELT document ID: E850003-086
Availability: Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.
Notes statement
There is not as yet an authoritative edition of Wilde's works.
Source description
Select editions
- The writings of Oscar Wilde (London; New York: A. R. Keller & Co. 1907) 15 vols.
- Robert Ross (ed), The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen & Co. 1908). 15 vols. Reprinted Dawsons: Pall Mall 1969.
- Complete works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994).
Select bibliography
- 'Notes for a bibliography of Oscar Wilde', Books and book-plates (A quarterly for collectors) 5, no. 3 (April 1905), 170-183.
- Karl E. Beckson, The Oscar Wilde encyclopedia (New York: AMS Press 1998). AMS Studies in the nineteenth century 18.
- Richard Ellmann (ed), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (Chicago 1982).
- Richard Ellmann; John Espey, Oscar Wilde: two approaches: papers read at a Clark Library seminar, April 17, 1976 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California 1977).
- Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde at Oxford: a lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on March 1, 1983 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress 1984).
- Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde: a biography (London: Hamilton 1987).
- Juliet Gardiner, Oscar Wilde: a life in letters, writings and wit (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995).
- Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, including My memories of Oscar Wilde, by George Bernard Shaw and an introductory note by Lyle Blair (London: Robinson, 1992).
- Rupert Hart-Davis (ed), Selected letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979).
- Rupert Hart-Davis (ed), More letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Murray 1985).
- Vyvyan Beresford Holland, Oscar Wilde: a pictorial biography (London: Thames & Hudson 1960).
- H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: a biography (London: Methuen 1977).
- Andrew McDonnell, Oscar Wilde at Oxford: an annotated catalogue of Wilde manuscripts and related items at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, including many hitherto unpublished letters, photographs and illustrations (A. McDonnell 1996). Limited edition of 170 copies.
- Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: E. G. Richards 1907). Also pubd. New York 1908, London 1914 in 2 vols. Repr. of 1914 edition: New York: Haskell House 1972.
- E. H. Mikhail, Oscar Wilde: an annotated bibliography of criticism (London: Macmillan 1978). Also pubd. Totowa NJ: Rowman & Littlefield 1978.
- Thomas A. Mikolyzk, Oscar Wilde: an annotated bibliography (Westport CT: Greenwood Press 1993). Bibliographies and indexes in world literature, 38.
- Norman Page, An Oscar Wilde chronology (London: Macmillan 1991).
- Hesketh Pearson, A Life of Oscar Wilde (London 1946).
- Richard Pine, The thief of reason: Oscar Wilde and modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1996).
- Horst Schroeder, Additions and corrections to Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (Braunschweig: H. Schroeder 1989).
The edition used in the digital edition
Wilde, Oscar (1987). ‘ΓΛΥΚΙΠΙΚΡΩΣ ΗΡΩΣ: Flower of Love’. In: The Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Galley Press, pp. 791–792.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E850003-086,
author = {Oscar Wilde},
title = {ΓΛΥΚΙΠΙΚΡΩΣ
ΗΡΩΣ: Flower of Love},
booktitle = {The Works of Oscar Wilde},
address = {London},
publisher = {Galley Press},
date = {1987},
pages = {791–792}
}
Encoding description
Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
Sampling declarations
All the editorial text with the corrections of the editor has been retained.
Editorial declarations
Correction: Text has been checked, proof-read and parsed using SGMLS.
Normalization: The electronic text represents the edited text.
Hyphenation: The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained.
Segmentation: div0=the whole text.
Interpretation: Names of persons (given names), and places are not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged.
Reference declaration
The n attribute of each text in this corpus carries a unique identifying number for the whole text.
The title of the text is held as the first head element within each text.
div0 is reserved for the text (whether in one volume or many).
Profile description
Creation: By Oscar Wilde (1854–1900).
Date: 1881
Language usage
- The text is in English. (en)
- The poem title is in Greek. (he)
Keywords: literary; poetry; 19c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2010-09-13: Conversion script run; new wordcount made; new SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2009-10-27: File updated. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2005-08-25: Normalised language codes and edited langUsage for XML conversion (ed. Julianne Nyhan)
- 2005-08-04T14:28:47+0100: Converted to XML (conversion Peter Flynn)
- 1997-10-23: Text parsed using SGMLS. (ed. Margaret Lantry)
- 1997-10-22: Text proofed; structural mark-up inserted. (ed. Margaret Lantry)
- 1997-10-17: Header created. (ed. Margaret Lantry)
- 1997: Text captured. (ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin)