Sweet, I blame you not, for mine the fault
was, had I not been made of common
clay
I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed
yet, seen the fuller air, the
larger day.
From the wildness of my wasted passion I
had struck a better, clearer song,
Lit some lighter light of freer freedom,
battled with some Hydra-headed wrong.
Had my lips been smitten into music by the
kisses that but made them bleed,
You had walked with Bice and the angels on
that verdant and enamelled meed.
I had trod the road which Dante treading
saw the suns of seven circles shine,
Ay! perchance had seen the heavens
opening, as they opened to the Florentine.
And the mighty nations would have crowned
me, who am crownless now and without
name,
And some orient dawn had found me
kneeling on the threshold of the House of
Fame.
I had sat within that marble circle where the
oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey, and
the lyre's strings are ever strung.
Keats had lifted up his hymeneal curls from
out the poppy-seeded wine,
With ambrosial mouth had kissed my
forehead, clasped the hand of noble love in
mine.
And at springtide, when the apple-blossoms
brush the burnished bosom of the
dove,
Two young lovers lying in an orchard would
have read the story of our love;
Would have read the legend of my passion,
known the bitter secret of my heart,
Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted
as we two are fated now to part.
For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by
the cankerworm of truth,
And no hand can gather up the fallen
withered petals of the rose of youth.
Yet I am not sorry that I loved you -ah! what
else had I a boy to do? -
For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the
silent-footed years pursue.
Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and
when once the storm of youth is
past,
Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death
the silent pilot comes at last.
And within the grave there is no pleasure,
for the blindworm battens on the
root,
And Desire shudders into ashes, and the
tree of Passion bears no fruit.
Ah! what else had I to do but love you?
God's own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheraean rising like an
argent lily from the sea.
I have made my choice, have lived my
poems, and, though youth is gone in
wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle
better than the poet's crown of bays.
by Oscar Wilde
