Glukupikros Eros

(Transliterated from the Greek)

Oscar Wilde

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 mead.

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 hymenaeal 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 canker-
    worm 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 a silent pilot
    comes at last.

And within the grave there is no pleasure, for the blind-
    worm 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.

                                                                        THE END.