Chapter III: Part 3

Another great poem grew out of his prison life. I refer to the long letter, made into a book by Mr. Ross and entitled _De Profundis_, for a poem, a prose poem, it is. It would be better to mention in this place that _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not composed until Wilde had left prison. _De Profundis_, however, was written within stone walls. In another place quotation has been made of Blunt’s Diaries in which Ross is quoted as having said that it is impossible to tell how much of _De Profundis_ is sincere repentance, and how much the result of self pity. Be that as it may, it is very certain that the spirit of the man was bitter in his solitude, that his egoism fell away from him at times. But it is absurd to expect that punishment and imprisonment and disgrace could change the man himself. If he had that feminine soul, he had it. It was part of him, and he could not get away from it, prison or no prison. But he could know in his own heart that he was not as he should have liked to be, that his life’s ideal was other than his life’s path. In other words, he realized, as we all realize, that while his eyes were fixed on the stars, his feet were firmly planted in the mud, and for that fact he was very sorry indeed. Not only sorry, but rebellious that things were as they were, and, as Wilde said, the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the air of heaven. The mood rebellious and the mood penitential cannot sit side by side in the same heart. Penitence presupposes submission and gratitude for gifts bestowed, and Wilde felt no gratitude to the fates that had, at his birth, dropped into his veins the one drop of black blood which colored his life. Destiny is omnipotent, and destiny had given Wilde the feminine soul. Doubtless, had Wilde been what he wished to be, in his better moments, he would have sat with august divinities. But neither Wilde, nor you, nor I, have it in our powers to command the winds that would waft us to the Islands of the Blest.

Transcriber’s Notes

- Italics represented with surrounding _underscores_.

- Small caps converted to ALL CAPS.

- Obvious typographic and grammatical errors silently corrected.

- Variations in hyphenation kept as in the original.

- p. 37: Corrected "a course oath" to "a coarse oath".

- p. 68: Corrected “It is the father of competition is the waste
as well as the destruction of energy.” To “It is the father
of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the
destruction, of energy.”