NB It wasn't actually the Penguin Kindle edition that I read, but I can't remember where I got my freebie edition of this collection from: it was either Amazon or Project Gutenberg...

As Australia trudges through the sordid process of conducting a government sponsored poll of popular opinion on gay marriage, I read a collection of Oscar Wilde’s poems in a collection titled after his most famous poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. The circumstances of Wilde’s imprisonment are well known, but they are a salutary reminder that homosexual law reform in Australia has been slow in coming and that living among us there are people who have been convicted and punished under archaic laws inherited from Britain. (It is only recently that the Andrews government in Victoria has passed legislation to expunge these old convictions). Wilde’s poem also reminds us that there are still too many places around the world where it is perilous to have same-sex relationships.

The collection contains many gems showing us a different side of Wilde. These are not the arch, witty, satirical words of the man who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. These poems show Wilde in a reflective mood, and often religious in tone: it’s a pity that none of them are dated in the freebie Kindle edition I read. I can quote them here because they are well out of copyright.

Sonnet On Hearing The Dies Irae Sung In The Sistine Chapel

[The Dies Irae has been set to exquisite music by Verdi and Mozart, and having gazed awestruck at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while surrounded shoulder-to-shoulder by other tourists, I can only dream about listening to the Dies Irae or any other hymn in the chapel as it was intended to be used. But Wilde in this poem is foreshadowing the doubt about the overemphasis on judgement, fear and despair at the expense of faith and hope in the Dies Irae which led to it being expunged from the Roman Catholic liturgy as part of the Vatican II reforms, more than half a century later.]

Sonnet On Hearing The Dies Irae Sung In The Sistine Chapel

Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,
Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,
Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love
Than terrors of red flame and thundering.
The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:
A bird at evening flying to its nest
Tells me of One who had no place of rest:
I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,
Come when the splendid fulness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/01/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol-by-oscar-wilde/ ( )

j'ai plus apprécié la "balade" que les poèmes. ne me laissera pas un souvenir impérissable. sans doute un genre littéraire dont il est difficile de m'imprégner. ( )