‘One should so live that one becomes a form of fiction. To be a fact is to be a failure.’ —Oscar Wilde, unpublished epigramSturgis, M. (2020) Wildeana, Riverrun, 194
For Wilde, the impulse to degrade poetic truths into prosaic facts was thoroughly tedious: myths should not be dispelled and imagination always surpassed reality. He also felt that it was ‘[b]etter to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope’.Wilde, O. (2007) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 4: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Guy, J., Oxford University Press, ‘The Truth of Masks’, 223 Nevertheless, there is much of value to be learnt about how Wilde composed his (pseudo-)autobiographical poems, through both close-reading of those poems and by taking a wider perspective that reveals the experiences that inspired them.
‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’ was first published in July 1877. Wilde, a self-confessed victim of the ‘maladie de perfection’,Letter from Oscar Wilde to Leonard Smithers, [11 December 1897], in Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 1006–7, 1007 revised the sonnet in 1881 and again in 1882. The poem is given below showing Wilde’s emendations (ignoring changes to punctuation, even though they were doubtless the result of many days of hard literary labour).Sherard, R. H. (1902) Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, privately printed, 72 Superseded words or phrases are enclosed in curly brackets; replacement words or phrases, in slashes.
I wandered {in} /through\ Scoglietto’s {green} /far\ retreat,
The oranges on each o’erhanging spray
Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the day;
Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet
{Showered the milk-white} /Made snow of all the\ blossoms, at my feet
Like silver {crowns} /moons\ the pale narcissi lay:
And the curved waves that streaked the {sapphire} /great green\ bay
Laughed i’ the sun, and life seemed very sweet.
Outside {a little child came} /the young boy-priest passed\ singing clear,
‘Jesus the {blessed Master} /Son of Mary\ has been slain,
O come and fill his sepulchre with flowers.’
Ah, God! Ah, God! {these sweet and honied} /those dear Hellenic\ hours
Had drowned all {memories} /memory\ of Thy bitter pain,
The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers, and the Spear.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 28, ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’
For the first eight lines Wilde revels in the aesthetic pleasures of his ‘retreat’, before the song of a passing ‘little child’ – later transfigured into a ‘young boy-priest’ – jolts him into contemplation of the Passion of the Christ. The conflict between pagan and Christian impulses was a standard theme in Wilde’s poetry of the late 1870s, and this poem is similar in treatment and structure to ‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’ and ‘The Theatre at Argos’.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 27, ‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’; No. 30, ‘The Theatre at Argos’. Although the conflict was no doubt genuine and heartfelt – Wilde was flirting with a conversion to Catholicism – its poetic expression may also have been pragmatic.For a discussion of this conflict in Wilde’s poetry, see Grech, L. (2019) Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education: The Oxford Classical Curriculum, Palgrave Macmillan, 31–63. His submissions were frequently rejected by editors but he was able to place several religious poems, including ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’, in Catholic periodicals.
To what extent is the sonnet autobiographical? Was Wilde inspired by a real place and time, and did he see and hear the things he describes? The clearest clue to the place described in the sonnet is the word ‘Scoglietto’. Richard Ellmann, in writing of the poem in his biography of Wilde, breezily refers to the ‘Scoglietto gardens’ as though he believed his readers required no more precise directions,Ellmann, R. (1987) Oscar Wilde, Hamish Hamilton, 68 but Fong and Beckson were left puzzled: Scoglietto was ‘presumably a locale near Genoa’, but they were unable to identify it and instead speculated that Wilde was referring to the islet of that name off the north coast of Elba, on which there is no evidence he ever set foot.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, commentary on line 1, 234
Wilde was definitely in Genoa during Holy Week 1877. His travelling companions were the Reverend John Pentland Mahaffy, his former Trinity College Dublin tutor; George A. Macmillan, a scion of the publishing firm; and William Goulding, the son of a Conservative MP from Cork. Macmillan’s letters home shed light on their time in the Ligurian city. They arrived on the train from Turin at about 4 p.m. on Holy Tuesday, which that year fell on 27 March,Letter from George A. Macmillan to Alexander Macmillan, 28 March 1877, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Archives and departed for Ravenna on the morning of Good Friday.Letter from George A. Macmillan to Margaret Macmillan, 29 March 1877, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Archives Macmillan wrote to his sister Margaret from Genoa on 29 March (Maundy Thursday). Here is the relevant passage:
Today after breakfasting with the Mahaffys we drove out to a most lovely public garden – the Scolgetto – too splendid for description – in terraces connected by winding paths, with a fine waterfall falling by stages down the middle from the top. The garden like Mr Novello’s was all luxuriant with oranges, & oranges, & irises, camellias &c. Here was a little round white marble temple delightfully placed among cypresses or olives. Here a villa as brightly coloured outside and decorated within after Pompeian fashion. At the top was a flight of steps & a wall with two fine rosaces & a tower all coloured a rich red – when we got splendid views over the town & the bay, & the amphitheatre of hills – the lower slopes all dotted with many coloured villas. A garden to wander about in for hours together. We all exclaimed how delightful for a garden party & I could wish for nothing better if you all & a select number of interesting friends could be transported hither.Letter from George A. Macmillan to Margaret Macmillan, 29 March 1877, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Archives
Macmillan addresses his letter from the ‘Hotel de Gênes’. This was the hotel also known as the Hôtel Genova that was situated near to the Teatro Carlo Felice on the Piazza De Ferrari, the city’s main square.A French edition of Baedeker’s guide to northern Italy refers to a ‘Gr.-H. de Gênes … près du théâtre Carlo Felice’ (Baedeker, K. (1909) L’Italie des alpes à Naples, 3rd ed., Karl Baedeker, 136). An English edition refers to an ‘Hôtel Genova … near the Teatro Carlo Felice’ (Baedeker, K. (1874) Baedeker’s Northern Italy, 3rd ed., Karl Baedeker, 84). The likelihood is that these two establishments are one and the same. The hotel was about 2.5 km from the Villa di Negro Rosazza della Scoglietto, which is identifiable as the Scoglietto (or ‘Scolgetto’) of Wilde’s poem and Macmillan’s letter. Baedeker’s 1874 guidebook to Northern Italy refers to this villa and its gardens:
A magnificent *view of Genoa and the harbour is obtained from the lofty belvedere of the Villa Negri, the beautiful garden of which (always open, gardener 1 fr.) rises beyond the Palazzo of the Marchese Negri (situated on the road, not far from the Pal. Doria).Baedeker, K. (1874) Baedeker’s Northern Italy, 3rd ed., Karl Baedeker, 93. Asterisks ‘denote objects deserving of special attention’.
The Villa Rosazza, with gardens behind and railway and road in front. © Mauro Nicolini, 2024.
Wilde and his friends may have been attracted by the promise of the magnificent view (and, perhaps, by the reasonable entrance fee: earlier in his letter, Macmillan notes that they were endeavouring to reserve their funds for Greece). Wilde felt the allure of lofty places: ‘The Theatre at Argos’ would be prompted by the view from the top of that ancient theatre, and in ‘San Miniato’ he declared that he had ‘climbed the mountain side’ to visit the church that overlooks Florence.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 5, ‘San Miniato’ While touring the United States he would tell an interviewer that, if he were to live ‘away from civilization, from London, he would live in the mountains’.‘An Aesthete in Undress’, The Sioux City Daily Journal (Sioux City, IA), 21 March 1882, 3,in Marland, R. (ed., 2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, I, 265–7, 266 Little wonder, then, that Scoglietto awakened his muse.
Mahaffy’s mother and sister, who lived in Genoa, may have recommended the gardens. Macmillan described Mahaffy’s sister as ‘pleasant enough in her way but [she] has a very shrill grating voice which she is rather too fond of hearing. We three have taken rather an objection to her.’ Another motivation for the visit to Scoglietto may therefore have been the desire for peace and quiet, and this is the atmosphere that Wilde evokes in his poem. In the final version he describes the time he spent in the garden as ‘those dear Hellenic hours’, to effect a contrast with the Christian sentiment of the poem, but his original phrasing may better capture his first impression of Scoglietto, the place where he passed ‘these sweet and honied hours’.
Now that we can be certain that Wilde visited Scoglietto, surely we can conclude that his poem is based on that visit. Not necessarily. Take, for example, the poem that Wilde published as ‘Salve Saturnia Tellus’ with the postscript ‘Genoa, 1877’ and later revised and republished as ‘Sonnet Written at Turin’ and ‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’, with the postscript, ‘Turin’.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 27, ‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’ Josephine Guy and Ian Small have remarked that ‘the occasion of the poem seems … to be intrinsic to its effect; it suggests that the poem ought to derive some of its power from the specificity of its setting.’ The fact that Wilde thought that the same or very similar lines could be ‘equally applicable to more than one location’ gives the impression that his methods were more pragmatic than artistic, and that his ‘revisions do not seem to have anything to do with capturing the authenticity of felt experience’.Guy, J. M. & Small, I. (2000) Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 229 Likewise, Wilde often drew not on his own experiences but on the art of others. His friend Rennell Rodd once noticed him, while engaged in writing a poem, leafing through a botanical textbook ‘from which he was selecting the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse’.Rodd, J. R. (1922) Social and Diplomatic Memories, 1884–1893, Edward Arnold & Co., 22 Ellmann deduced that this poem must have been ‘The Burden of Itys’, in which flowers that bloom at different seasons appear together.Ellmann, R. (1987) Oscar Wilde, Hamish Hamilton, 131
Eve Tempted by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, c. 1877. Manchester Art Gallery.
Wilde may have found the ‘pale narcissi’ of his Genoese sonnet in the pages of a book rather than in Scoglietto: the white-petalled Narcissus poeticus, or poet’s daffodil, does bloom in Liguria in spring, though generally later than when Wilde visited at the end of March. Wilde scrumped his sonnet’s golden lamp-like oranges from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ (1653–1654), a poem about English pilgrims who navigate the ‘wat’ry maze’ of the Atlantic to a land of ‘eternal spring’. Marvell recounts how God has lavished this new Garden of Eden with wondrous means of sustenance, including oranges: ‘He hangs in shades the Orange bright, | Like golden Lamps in a green Night.’Marvell, A. (1971) The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, Vol. 1: Poems, 3rd ed., eds. H. M. Margoliouth & Pierre Legouis, Oxford University Press, ‘Bermudas’, 17–18, lines 17–18 Wilde, often accused of plagiarism, defended himself against the charge by asserting that if he saw a monstrous tulip in someone else’s garden he was entitled to grow one more monstrous in his own,Wilde, O. (1912) Salomé, ed. Robert Ross, John Lane, xxiii and he doubtless felt the same about fruit as he did flowers. Then again, oranges do grow in Liguria in spring, so Wilde may have seen them there. For Wilde, the sight of oranges repeatedly evoked ‘Bermudas’. Not long after visiting Genoa he saw John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Eve Tempted at the Grosvenor Gallery and used Marvell’s words to describe its forbidden fruit (which, from their colour and the smooth-margined leaves among which they cluster, appear to be oranges rather than apples).Wilde, O. (2013a) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 6: Journalism, Vol. 1, eds. Stokes, J. & Turner, M. W., Oxford University Press, No. 1, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, 5.169. See also Stanhope’s The Expulsion from Eden (1900), in which the fruit and leaves are painted in the same manner. And Marvell’s words came to him again in 1900 when, in a letter to Robert Ross, he wrote of seeing the orange-gardens of Sicily’s Conca d’Oro.‘The lemon-groves and the orange-gardens were so entirely perfect that I became again a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the ordinary Impressionists, whose muddy souls and blurred intelligences would have rendered but by mud and blur those “golden lamps hung in a green night” that filled me with such joy.’ Letter from Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, 16 April [1900], in Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 1178–81, 1178
Another source for ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’ may be one of Wilde’s own poems: ‘Ravenna’. Canto V of the Newdigate Prize-winning poem relates a walk in the city’s pinetum in terms remarkably similar to those in ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’:
I wandered through the wood in wild delight,
Some startled bird, with fluttering wings and fleet,
Made snow of all the blossoms: at my feet,
Like silver crowns, the pale narcissi lay,
And small birds sang on every twining spray.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 26, ‘Ravenna’, lines 154–8
The sequence of events in Canto V and the sonnet also match, although in ‘Ravenna’ Wilde is awoken from his reverie on nature not by singing but by a ‘convent’s vesper bell’, and is reminded not of the crucifixion but of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 26, ‘Ravenna’, lines 175–80 Both poems appear to draw on the same experience. Because Wilde left Genoa for Ravenna on 30 March 1877 and proceeded to Brindisi on 1 April,Page, N. (1991) An Oscar Wilde Chronology, Macmillan, 8 he is unlikely to have visited the pinetum as well as the many other places referenced in ‘Ravenna’.‘Ravenna’ includes descriptions of the Colonne dei Francesi (lines 57–67), the Mausoleum of Theodoric (lines 68–76), the grave of Dante Alighieri (lines 80–92), the Palazzo Guiccioli (lines 107–12), and the church of Santa Maria in Porto Fuori (lines 294–5). Wilde also claimed to have seen Ravenna’s mosaics: his reference in a letter to his tutor at Magdalen to a mosaic depicting an enthroned Madonna indicates that he visited the Basilica di Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo (letter from Oscar Wilde to the Rev. H. R. Bramley, 2 April 1877, in Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 45); his reference in his review of the 1877 Grosvenor Gallery exhibition to ‘peacocks in the four spandrils [sic]’ of a mosaic ceiling at Ravenna indicates that he visited the Basilica di San Vitale (Wilde, O. (2013a) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 6: Journalism, Vol. 1, eds. Stokes, J. & Turner, M. W., Oxford University Press, No. 1, lines 438–40). He probably concocted this walk as an act of devotion to his literary heroes Dante Alighieri and Lord Byron, both of whom had written of the forest.Tamara L. Follini (2020) ‘Into the wood: Dante, Byron and James in “Ravenna”’, Viatica HS3, paragraphs 19–20, doi:10.52497/viatica1152 What’s more, ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’ was published before ‘Ravenna’, so Canto V is more likely to be a reworking of the sonnet than vice versa. Wilde might protest that ‘[b]etween two truths, the falser is the truer’,Ellmann, R. (1987) Oscar Wilde, Hamish Hamilton, 324 but it is the walk in Genoa that has the better claim to a basis in reality. The blossoms, flowers, fruit and startled bird of Wilde’s Genoese poem seem to be a product of Life as well as Art.
A visit to Scoglietto
A decade ago the gardens of the Villa Rosazza were restored and the Genoa-based local history blogger Sabina Ribatto found them every bit as enchanting as had Wilde, Macmillan and Goulding. In the heart of June 2015, she saw the acanthus blooming and retirees basking beneath a golden summer sun.‘It is full summer now, the heart of June’: Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 75, ‘The Garden of Eros’, line 1 Students of the Russian Ballet College, the current tenants of the rose-coloured villa, pranced inside to practise their pliés and pirouettes. Scoglietto remained ‘an oasis of peace and harmony, a place of great charm’.[Sabina Ribatto], ‘I giardini di Villa Rosazza’, Dear Miss Fletcher, 13 June 2015, dearmissfletcher.com Accessed 13 June 2024.
Wall in the park of the Villa Rosazza. Macmillan saw rosace windows in these now-empty apertures. © Mauro Nicolini, 2024.
View from the park of the Villa Rosazza. © Mauro Nicolini, 2024.
The temple in the park of the Villa Rosazza, graffitied and overgrown. © Mauro Nicolini, 2024.
View of San Vincenzo de’ Paoli (left) from the temple. © Sabina Ribatto, Dear Miss Fletcher, 2015.
The basin of the waterfall viewed from the grotto in the park of the Villa Rosazza, as it was in 2015 (and perhaps also in 1877) but not in 2024. © Sabina Ribatto, Dear Miss Fletcher, 2015.
This sounded enticing and so in late spring 2024 I transported myself to Genoa and visited the park with fellow Wildeans Thomas Wright and Mauro Nicolini. Upon entering, we were disappointed to discover it had become a scruffy, degraded, deserted, and rather forbidding place. Behind the villa we peered down into the lower garden. Neatly appointed in 2015, it was now marred with nettles and poppy.‘Nettles and poppy mar each rock-hewn seat’: Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 30, ‘The Theatre at Argos’, line 1 We followed the winding path upwards. The way was littered with broken bottles, newspapers and cigarette stubs. There was no fruit on the trees (not even of any kind). We saw no pale narcissi, no milk-white blossoms, no irises, and no camellias. At the top of the garden we found the wall still standing, though the glass in its two rosace windows was long gone. The adjoining ‘rich red’ tower – Baedeker’s ‘lofty belvedere’ – was also no more. There was only a low ruin. The remnants of the ‘flight of steps’, carpeted with grass and vines, led nowhere. I was reminded of something Mahaffy had written about a ruined temple he and Wilde saw in Greece: ‘There is something touching in the unconscious efforts of nature to fill up the breaks and heal the rents which time and desolation have made in human work.’Mahaffy, J. P. (1878) Rambles and Studies in Greece, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 344
We turned to the view of the bay. Genoa lay desecrated at our feet.‘And desecrated Argos at my feet’: Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 30, ‘The Theatre at Argos’, line 8 In the harbour long grey fingers of concrete grasped at the cruise ships heaving in from the unvintageable sea.‘unvintageable sea’: Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 37, ‘Vita Nuova’, line 1 Between the sapphire-green waters and the villa an elevated road and the Turin–Genoa railway lay like rods of polished steel.‘rods of polished steel’: Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, No. 95, ‘II. La Mer’, line 8 I could excuse Wilde and Macmillan for not mentioning the railway on which they had ridden into Genoa as it was so hideous; eliding the flyover on the rather spurious basis that in 1877 it had yet to be built seemed the falser of the two lies.
We descended the east side of the garden. Here was the ‘little round white marble temple’, in relatively good condition apart from a few cracks in the ceiling and graffiti on the columns. We noticed a short distance away the tower of the church of San Vincenzo de’ Paoli, painted in a Whistlerian scheme of yellow and white. Was it this juxtaposition of neoclassical and Baroque architecture that had suggested to Wilde the Hellenic and Christian theme of his poem? If so, it is curious that such a lover of Greek things chose not to refer to the temple in his poem. Then again, in America Wilde would object to the ‘sham Greek porticoes’ of New York’s Fifth Avenue and declare that to enjoy the only beautiful vista in Washington DC one should stand with one’s back to the neoclassical Capitol.‘The Aesthete at Washington’, Springfield Daily Republican (Springfield, MA), 30 January 1882, 4–5, in Marland, R. (ed., 2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, I, 108–9, 109; ‘Weary Wilde’, The Chicago Times (Chicago, IL), 11 February 1882, 6, in Marland, I, 155–8, 157. In any case, in the spring of 1877 he was looking forward to visiting Greece and seeing real Greek architecture. Upon returning to England he would draft a list of poems he intended to write, many of which, including ‘Olympia’ and ‘Athens’, survive only as titles.Wilde, O. (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds. Fong, B. & Beckson, K., Oxford University Press, 332 These beautiful unwritten poems would probably have mused on the Temple of Zeus and the Parthenon. If Wilde failed to pen paeans to such wonders then what chance had a miniature monopteros in a Genoese garden?
Moving further down we stumbled upon the course of the waterfall – a series of six or seven ledges leading to a grotto over which water had once cascaded into an ornate shell-shaped basin. The scene seemed a fitter inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land than Wilde’s sonnet, because we found only ‘dry stone’ and ‘no sound of water’.Eliot, T. S. (1922) The Waste Land, Boni & Liveright, 11
Drowning all memories
As we emerged back into the bustling streets of Genoa, a train bound for Turin thundered by. I remembered Wilde’s wise words on the dangers of modern tourism:
The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the rate of forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any memory of that lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier at Rome, or that he got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or civilisation much good.Wilde, O. (1908) The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross, Methuen, 295
Perhaps this accounts for Wilde’s writing so little prose about his travels in Italy. A brief essay accompanied the poem with which he commemorated his visit to the grave of Keats in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, but he could not resist complaining in a footnote about the ‘ugly’ memorial slab that had recently been fixed to a nearby wall.Wilde, O. (2013a), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 6: Journalism, Vol. 1, eds. Stokes, J. & Turner, M. W., Oxford University Press, No. 2, ‘The Tomb of Keats’ This complaint did civilisation no good at all, as a century-and-a-half later the slab is still in place. Wilde must have realised that his Oxford mentor Walter Pater had been correct to tell him that prose was so much more difficult than poetry.Walter Pater: Wilde, O. (2013b) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 7: Journalism, Vol. 2, eds. Stokes, J. & Turner, M. W., Oxford University Press, No. 134, ‘Mr. Pater’s Last Volume’, lines 4–7 Later, he decided that it was best to ‘[f]orget everything unpleasant’.‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy’, The New York Herald, European Edition (Paris, France), 9 September 1893, 1, in Marland, R. (ed., 2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, II, 635–6, 635
Resolving to forget Scoglietto’s appalling retreat and take refuge in Art rather than Life, I read again ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa’. In Wilde’s garden of verse spring is eternal. Narcissi bloom forever, oranges ceaselessly burn like lamps of gold, and life is always very sweet.The second part of this article represents, in the manner of Wilde’s imitation of Dante and Byron, an act of vicarious travel: I did not visit Scoglietto with Tom and Mauro, and I thank them for sharing their impressions and photographs.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Thomas Wright, Mauro Nicolini, and Sabina Ribatto.