Re-membering Wilde

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

The above are a few lines from the poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' which Oscar Wilde wrote after coming out from prison. He was charged with gross indecency just for being a homosexual in the late 19th century. He could never really emerge from his treatment at the hands of the government and declined to die destitute and penniless in France. The above lines are on his epitaph and mark the sad and unnecessary end of an absolute genius. Read 'Importance of being Earnest' or 'Dorian Gray' and you would know what I am talking about. Read his essays on aestheticism (The decay of lying) and human soul and creative spirit (The soul of man under Socialism) and you would see the world around you in a more beautiful more passionate light. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' itself is a brilliant poem. A few more lines that I like:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Another awesome poem by him is 'The Harlot's House'. I liked it so much that I took a few lines from it and used them as the epigraph in my PhD thesis. It's another matter that in a completely surreal sort of way, those lines had nothing to do whatsoever with my PhD. The title of this post ('Re-membering Wilde) is another little trivia about him which I would refrain from divulging here :).