Uploaded on November 22, 2011
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 virelay,
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:
Is that time dead? Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
—Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems
11.22.2023: A speaker in an Oscar Wilde poem talking about being played like a lute by the winds: how interesting.