Page 1 of 130 Poem: Helas! - Ballad of Reading Gaol

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde

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Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

POEMS BY OSCAR WILDE

Poem: 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 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?

		"There are... things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." Fyodor Dostoyevsky