Poems in Prose (Wilde collection)
Poems in Prose is the collective title of six prose poems published by Oscar Wilde in The Fortnightly Review. Derived from Wilde's many oral tales, these prose poems are the only six that were published by Wilde in his lifetime, and they include : "The Artist", "The Doer of Good", "The Disciple", "The Master", "The House of Judgment" and "The Teacher of Wisdom". Two of these prose poems, "The House of Judgment" and "The Disciple", had appeared earlier in The Spirit Lamp, an Oxford undergraduate magazine, on 17 February and 6 June 1893 respectively. A set of illustrations for the prose poems was completed by Wilde's friend and frequent illustrator, Charles Ricketts, who never published the pen-and-ink drawings in his lifetime. The set of prose poems was released in a privately printed chapbook in 1905.
Form and influences
According to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the defining traits of the prose poem are "unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness". Invented in the nineteenth century, the modern prose poem form is largely indebted to Charles Baudelaire's experiments in the genre, notably in his Petits poèmes en prose, which created the subsequent interest in France exemplified by later writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. In English literature, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Kingsley were progenitors of the form.Summaries
The Artist
In this prose poem, an artist is filled with the desire to create an image of "The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment". Able to fashion this image out of bronze only, he searches the world for the metal but all he can find is the bronze of one of his earlier pieces, "The Sorrow that endureth for Ever". The prose poem ends with the artist melting down his earlier creation to create his sculpture of "The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment".The Doer of Good
This tale narrates the lives of four individuals after they have been helped by Christ. Noticing a man who is living exorbitantly, Christ asks him why he is living this way, to which the man replies that he was a leper and Christ healed him: how else should he live? Seeing another man lusting after a prostitute, Christ asks this man why he looks at the women in that way, to which he replies that he was blind but now can see: at what else should he look? Christ turns to the woman, and asks her, too, why she is living in sin: you have forgiven me my sins, she says in turn. Lastly, Christ comes upon a man weeping by the roadside. When Christ asks why he is weeping, the man replies: I was raised from the dead, so what else should I do but weep?The Disciple
This story is told from the perspective of the reflection pool in which Narcissus gazed at himself. Beginning immediately after Narcissus' death, the prose poem captures the Oreads and the pool grieving for the loss of Narcissus. Seeing that the pool has become a "cup of salt tears", the Oreads try to console the pool, saying that it must be hard not to mourn for someone so beautiful. The pool, however, confesses that it did not know Narcissus was beautiful; instead, it admits that it is mourning because its own beauty was reflected in Narcissus' eyes."The Disciple" is used by Paulo Coelho as the basis for his prologue to The Alchemist.