eBooks Base 2000

As his most scintillating
advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages
in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love
and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims,
I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is
gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's
crown of bays,
and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different
mood, expressed in the sonnet _Helas_:
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelai,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.


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