Amendment Act of 1885, known as the Labouchere Amendment after the member of Parliament who had proposed it, effectively criminalized all forms of sexual relations between men.) The revulsion of feeling against him in Britain and America was violent, and the aesthetic movement suffered a severe setback not only with the public but among writers as well.
His two years in jail led Wilde to write two sober and emotionally high-pitched works, his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and his prose confession De Profundis (1905). After leaving prison, Wilde, a ruined man, emigrated to France, where he lived out the last three years of his life under an assumed name. Before his departure from England he had been divorced and declared a bankrupt, and in France he had to rely on friends for financial support. Wilde is buried in Paris in the Pere Lachaise cemetery.
Impression du Matin1
The Thames nocturne of blue and gold2
Changed to a harmony in grey;
A barge with ochre-colored hay
Dropped from the wharf:3 and chill and cold
1. Impression of the morning (French). Wilde may be referring to an earlier painting by 2. Cf. the 'Nocturnes' (paintings of nighttime Whistler, Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely scenes) by James McNeill Whistler in the 1870s. Alexander (1872-74). Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge 3. I.e., left the wharf and went down river with the was one of this series; it was painted by 1875 but ebb tide. given its present title in 1892. In the next line
.
1688 / OSCAR WILDE
5
The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses' walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's
Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.4
Then suddenly arose the clang
10 Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country wagons; and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
15 Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.
1881
The Harlot's House
We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the Harlot's house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
5 We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.1
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind. io We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
15 Went sidling through the slow quadrille,2 Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;3
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
20 A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing,
