TerseVerse

A Small Commentary on Oscar Wilde’s “Sonnet On Hearing The Dies Irae Sung In The Sistine Chapel”
–Miguel Sena

Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,
Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,
Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love
Than terrors of red flame and thundering.
The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:
A bird at evening flying to its nest
Tells me of One who had no place of rest:
I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,
Come when the splendid fulness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.

Wilde’s poem gains a whole new medium when read under the same conditions it was written (or supposedly such). I read it and re-read it with Mozart’s Dies Irae playing on the background, and it definitely gains a whole new level of emotiveness. It is in itself a cry of “Kyrie Eleison” just like the ones of the song, they complement each other and seek to attain the same goal: that God will show Himself through the wonders of Nature & Life that already praise him (through the “hillside vines”, “a bird flying to its nest”) rather than through the violence demonstrate in the Dies Irae (“Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love / Than terrors of red flame and thundering”). It is a simple poem with a strong message – it is a wish for the retrograde sense of the Punisher God to be left behind already, and it accomplishes it.

Technically, we witness an uninterrupted series of 14 iambic pentameters (except in L3 and L11, where the first iambs are replaced by trochees) with a rhyme scheme of |abbaaccadefdef|. Negatively, I find that the hyperbaton at L5 is quite distracting, as it is the most blatant occurrence of forced rhyme in the poem. The ending in itself is interesting and unexpected – by changing the Narrator to a plural form, the universality of the poem itself is assured, and also something else: N has waited long for God to show Himself to Mankind, and it seems that N feels or thinks that now is the time (in a quite apocalyptic vision of it, I dare to add), and is fearing the inevitability that He will thus show himself in the Dies Irae fashion. The poem becomes, then, a last-hour plea, before the time where God will reap His harvest.