A defence of a life spent loving
Apologia
"The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!"
Poem
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,And at thy pleasure weave that web of painWhose brightest threads are each a wasted day?
Is it thy will—Love that I love so well—That my Soul’s House should be a tortured spotWherein, like evil paramours, must dwellThe quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?
Nay, if it be thy will I shall endure,And sell ambition at the common mart,And let dull failure be my vestiture,And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.
Perchance it may be better so—at leastI have not made my heart a heart of stone,Nor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,Nor walked where Beauty is a thing unknown.
Many a man hath done so; sought to fenceIn straitened bonds the soul that should be free,Trodden the dusty road of common sense,While all the forest sang of liberty,
Not marking how the spotted hawk in flightPassed on wide pinion through the lofty air,To where some steep untrodden mountain heightCaught the last tresses of the Sun God’s hair.
Or how the little flower he trod upon,The daisy, that white-feathered shield of gold,Followed with wistful eyes the wandering sunContent if once its leaves were aureoled.
But surely it is something to have beenThe best belovèd for a little while,To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seenHis purple wings flit once across thy smile.
Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feedOn my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeedThe Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!
In brief
SummaryThe speaker asks the one he loves whether it is the beloved's will that he should fail: trade his cloth of gold for coarse grey, weave a web of wasted days, and let his soul become a place of torment. If so, he will endure it, selling his ambition and wearing failure like clothing. Perhaps it is better, he reflects, than the life of men who fence in their souls and tread 'the dusty road of common sense', blind to beauty. It is something to have been 'The best belovèd for a little while', and to have known 'The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars'.
Key themes
"Trodden the dusty road of common sense,"
Summary
The first two stanzas are questions to the beloved, addressed as 'Love that I love so well'. Is it the beloved's will that he should 'wax and wane', 'Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey', and weave 'that web of pain / Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day'? Is it that same will that 'my Soul's House should be a tortured spot' where 'The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not' must dwell? In the third stanza he accepts: if that is the beloved's will, he will 'sell ambition at the common mart', let 'dull failure be my vestiture', and let sorrow dig its grave in his heart.
'Perchance it may be better so', he goes on. At least he has not made his heart stone, starved his boyhood, or 'walked where Beauty is a thing unknown'. Many men have: they fence in the soul, tread 'the dusty road of common sense' while the forest sings of liberty, and never notice the spotted hawk soaring to a sunlit peak, or the daisy they tread on, which follows the sun with 'wistful eyes'.
The last two stanzas give his defence. 'Surely it is something to have been / The best belovèd for a little while', to have walked hand in hand with Love and seen 'His purple wings flit once across thy smile'. Though 'the gorgèd asp of passion' feeds on his heart, he has 'burst the bars', stood face to face with Beauty, and known 'The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!'
Characters
The speaker
The lover defending himself
A young man, speaking of his 'boy's heart' and his boyhood, who asks whether his beloved wills his ruin and agrees to bear it. He compares himself favourably with the men of 'common sense', and justifies his life by having been loved and by having 'Stood face to face with Beauty'.
The beloved
Love that I love
The one addressed as 'Love that I love so well', whose 'will' decides the speaker's fate and whose smile Love's purple wings once crossed. The beloved never speaks, but the whole poem answers what the speaker imagines the beloved wants of him.
Themes
Failure accepted
The speaker pictures his own decline in terms of cloth and trade: 'cloth of gold' bartered 'for hodden grey', ambition sold 'at the common mart', 'dull failure' worn as 'vestiture'. He accepts all this as the price of love, 'if it be thy will'. The poem does not deny that the loss is real; the 'worm that dieth not' and 'the gorgèd asp of passion' make clear the suffering involved.
Beauty against common sense
The middle of the poem sets the speaker against men who 'fence / In straitened bonds the soul that should be free' and have 'Trodden the dusty road of common sense'. They miss the spotted hawk and the trampled daisy 'that white-feathered shield of gold'. The speaker would rather suffer than live 'where Beauty is a thing unknown', and counts his sorrows a fair price.
Love as justification
The title means a defence, and the defence is love. 'Surely it is something to have been / The best belovèd for a little while' is modest, but the last line rises to the highest claim of all. 'The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars' echoes the closing line of Dante's Paradiso, so one human love is joined to the divine love that turns the heavens.
Quotes
"Trodden the dusty road of common sense,"
The speaker
"But surely it is something to have been"
The speaker
"The best belovèd for a little while,"
The speaker
Context
'Apologia' appears in the 'Fourth Movement' section of Wilde's collected poems. The title means a defence or justification, and the poem, in nine rhymed quatrains, is a lover's defence of a life given up to love and beauty. Its last line echoes the final line of Dante's Paradiso, and 'the worm that dieth not' is a biblical phrase for the torments of hell.
About this edition
- Text: the complete work from Standard Ebooks, released into the public domain (CC0 1.0). We change only the layout.
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- Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.