The Disciple

By Oscar Wilde

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, ‘We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.’

‘But was Narcissus beautiful?’ said the pool.

‘Who should know that better than you?’ answered the Oreads. ‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.’

And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’

Podcast Transcript

This poem appeared in a small collection by Oscar Wilde called Poems in Prose, published in 1894. The title is an echo of a collection by Baudelaire called Petits Poèmes en Prose – meaning little poems in prose – which was published in 1869. The prose poem was a form that emerged in the 19th century and was associated with French literature and the Bohemian counterculture – such as that of the Latin Quarter in Paris, where poets, artists, intellectuals, and other reprobates would drink absinthe and live a life that attracted the disapproval of the petits bourgeois.

Which was a milieu in which Wilde was very much at home. He spent a lot of time in Paris, and was well versed in French literature. He had even written a play in French, Salomé, which was published in 1893. So a prose poem by Oscar Wilde published in 1894 is almost absurdly fin de siècle, the French term for the end of the 19th century, it’s redolent of the decadent atmosphere of the time.

Wilde’s collection Poems in Prose contained six prose poems, most of which were based on biblical stories, but with a subversive twist. So there is one about a young man who is weeping after the crucifixion of Jesus, and a passer-by says, ‘I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great, for surely He was a just man.’ And the young man says, No, I’m weeping because I did all the same miracles that Jesus did, ‘And yet they have not crucified me’. That’s a sample of the kind of mischief Wilde was up to in the book. This one, ’The Disciple’, is less obviously subversive because it’s based on a classical myth rather than the scriptures, but hold that ’less obviously’ part, because Wilde is most definitely up to mischief in this poem, and we will come back to that in a bit.

The very form of the prose poem is transgressive. You know, the name ’prose poem’ has been described as an oxymoron – it’s a paradox. Because we are used to thinking of prose and poetry as completely separate categories. So, let’s start with the definition. What is a prose poem? Well, it’s what it says on the tin: it’s a poem written in prose. There have been various ways to define or justify it, but Jeremy Noel-Tod, who edited the excellent Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, says that after several years of research, the only common definition he could come up with was ’a poem without line breaks’. And since he has spent more time on it than I have, I am happy to defer to him.

Of course, calls to mind the classic definition of poetry versus verse, which is that verse is writing that’s chopped up into lines – the Latin versus meaning a turn. Beyond this bare-bones definition various people have tried to characterise the prose poem and distinguish it from other short prose forms. Otherwise, you could say that just about any short piece of prose, qualifies as a prose poem, which it really doesn’t. They do tend to be short. The longer they get, the more likely they are to start to look like something else. If it’s a narrative that gets longer, then it’s basically a short story. If it’s a proposition or an argument that gets longer, it starts to look like an essay, and so on.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry says that it is characterised by ‘high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness’. My own view is that prose poems tend to be a bit odd. There’s something a bit strange about them that doesn’t quite make logical, linear, or narrative sense. They can be surprising – surprising and funny, a bit like a joke with a punchline, as in this one by Wilde. But a lot of them are more subtle than that, with something a little unsettling, something that doesn’t quite seem to add up.

So that’s the basic form we are dealing with, and it’s an ongoing debate whether the prose poem is a valid form of poetry. Even though prose is currently a really popular form in contemporary poetry.

Personally, I have only ever written one prose poem, and I must admit, it did have a little frisson of transgression. It felt like I was doing something that was a little bit too easy, not too demanding. But the flip side is, the easier something is, the more people will be doing it, and therefore the better you have to be at it to write an outstanding one. T. S. Eliot described the prose poem as ‘an aberration that is only justified by complete success’ – because if you are going to do it, you are inviting the reader to scrutinise your every word to see if it justifies itself and if repays attention in the way it would in any other poem. So let’s do that now with Wilde’s poem.

OK, the first thing we notice is the title: ‘The Disciple’. Then the next thing we notice is that the opening of the poem is about Narcissus, the pool, and the Oreads, who were nymphs in Greek mythology. With no disciple in sight. So we realise that this is a puzzle we are going to have to figure out. The title is kind of hovering above us like a question as we read.

Next, we have another look at the opening and think, OK, the poem is about Narcissus – in classical mythology, he was the youth who fell in love with himself by looking at his reflection in a pool. The most famous version is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which we looked at in the Arthur Golding translation back in Episode 79. But right from the start, we can see that this is not a conventional retelling of the story, because it begins at the end, with the death of Narcissus. So this is evidently a sequel to the classic tale.

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, ‘We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.’

OK listen to the tone here. Could it be more sonorous, more self-conscious, more deliberately archaic and composed? Some might say more pretentious, but of course I wouldn’t say that. It’s like a Pre-Raphaelite picture composed in prose. Notice how the Oreads loosen the green dresses of their hair before they start talking. That’s very typical of the period. Women and fairies tend to do that in Yeats’s poetry.

The register is drawn from the King James Version of the Bible, with lots of inverted syntax: “We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus… So beautiful was he.” Notice the inversion: not “He was so beautiful”, but “So beautiful was he.” Normal people would never talk like this, but of course, these are not normal people. They are the Oreads, the nymphs who were in love with Narcissus, but were rejected by him… for himself.

Another thing that’s very typical of the style of the King James Bible is parallelism, where you get the same words or the same phrases repeated with variations. So in the first paragraph we’ve got ‘the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears’. And then in the second paragraph, ‘the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears’.

So what we’ve got so far is a very stylised continuation of the scene from the classical story. We’re still in the realm of the conventional, but the second paragraph ends by reiterating what we all know: that Narcissus was beautiful. But – and there is a ’but’, and the ’but’ is spoken by the pool:

‘But was Narcissus beautiful?’ said the pool.

First of all, it’s a little startling that the pool is speaking at all. But even more startling is what it says: ‘Was Narcissus beautiful?’ I mean, if there’s one thing everybody knows about Narcissus, it’s that he was beautiful – too beautiful in fact, for his own good. And as the Oreads point out, no one was in a better position to judge this than the pool:

‘Who should know that better than you?’ answered the Oreads. ‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.’

And the pool answers, and once again it starts with a ‘but’:

And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’

Okay, well done, Oscar. This is pretty funny, isn’t it? even after 130 years. So in Wilde’s version of events, the pool is a bigger narcissist than Narcissus. And once again he’s channelling the spirit of the times, because it was in the late 1890s that the term ‘narcissism’ was first used by psychiatrists, in the sense of a sexual perversion.

So all the time Narcissus was gazing into the pool, the pool was gazing back. It was looking into the mirrors of Narcissus’s eyes and seeing itself mirrored in them, which is a pretty clever idea for a poem, isn’t it? You’ve got to have a really strong and precise visual imagination to be able to come up with that, because for 2,000-odd years, the whole world had been reading this story and painting pictures of it, and yet all they had ever seen was Narcissus looking at the pool. Nobody had zoomed in the way Wilde did, with complete optical accuracy, and noticed that the pool is also mirrored in Narcissus.

So what does the poem mean? Well, it’s Oscar Wilde, so we could be here all day unpicking his cleverness, and maybe that was Wilde’s main intention. It’s beautiful, it’s clever, and it’s funny, so maybe that was enough for him, given that he was the arch-proponent of art for art’s sake – the idea that it was not necessary for art to be useful or edifying or educational in any way. Well, let’s have a go regardless.

Firstly, I think we have the answer to the puzzle of the title: Who is the disciple? Well, it’s clearly the pool, who has learned by imitating Narcissus’s self-absorption.

Also, given that Wilde was a very self-conscious artist and very well read, he may well be alluding to the famous line from Hamlet, where he says that the actor’s job is to ‘hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature’. At the end of the poem, the word ‘mirror’ appears four times: the Oreads say that Narcissus would look at the pool, “and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty”. And then the pool replies, and note the parallelism again of the repeated phrasing: “in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.”

Wilde has constructed a verbal hall of mirrors: the mirror of the pool reflected in the eyes, reflected in the pool reflected in the eyes, and so on ad infinitum. So maybe this is just a witty comment on the self-absorption of the artist.

It also perhaps makes us think about The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s novel, which he wrote a few years previously, where the self-absorption of Dorian Gray is famously captured in the portrait of himself that he keeps in his attic – a different kind of self-image to a mirror, but obviously in the same ballpark. You could even say that this poem is a mirror image of the Dorian Gray parable, because instead of being hidden away in the attic like the painting, the pool is foregrounded and becomes the main character.

Turning back to Narcissus, this was a very popular subject among French Symbolist artists in the 1890s, almost to the point of obsession. It was clearly a very sensuous image, and in an age of sexual repression where homosexuality was illegal, it was also a coded image of autoeroticism as well as same-sex desire.

There have also been biographical readings of this poem as a coded reference to Bosie – Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover – who happened to be the editor who first published this poem in a student magazine, The Spirit Lamp, the year before it was included in the Poems in Prose collection.

We could keep going with the interpretations. Maybe you have one or two of your own to add to mine, but I’d like to conclude by noticing how beautifully and precisely Wilde has arranged his verbal mirrors in those last two sentences.

‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.’

And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’

We have the parallelism, the repeated phrasing of the phrasing. We also have the word ‘mirror’ used four times, alternating between noun and verb: “in the mirror [noun] of your waters he would mirror [verb] his own beauty”, and then “in the mirror [noun] of his eyes… I saw ever my own beauty mirrored [passive verb].”

Not only that, but in the final phrasing, there’s a wonderful inversion. So we get “in the mirror of your waters” and “in the mirror of his eyes” – those are two exactly parallel phrases. But in the final clauses, we get “mirror his own beauty”, and then the pool saying, “I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.” So, it’s first ‘mirror’ then ‘beauty’, and then in ‘beauty mirrored’, it’s the other way round. This is a rhetorical pattern known as chiasmus, where you repeat a phrase but invert it. Famous examples are: ‘Man should live to eat, not eat to live’, and ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’.

I think it’s a really clever and beautiful move by Wilde, where he’s mirroring – if you will forgive the pun – the whole movement of the poem, which is to invert the usual interpretation of the story, and he inverts the syntax of that phrase in a very beautiful way. It means that the word ‘mirrored’ is the final word of the poem, onto which is projected all the meanings, all the reflections, all the clever inversions, paradoxes, and cultural associations of the story of Narcissus. And also the paradoxes and contradictions of the prose poem as a form. And maybe we can also catch a glimpse of Wilde himself, smiling enigmatically.

So, going back to T. S. Eliot’s statement that the prose poem is only justified by complete success, I think Oscar Wilde can take a bow and say that he has executed this poem with supreme craftsmanship and succeeded beautifully on his own terms. Which was pretty well Wilde’s mission in life. So let’s have another listen to the poem and appreciate the beauty, the craftsmanship, the cleverness and the humour of ‘The Disciple’.

The Disciple

By Oscar Wilde

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, ‘We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.’

‘But was Narcissus beautiful?’ said the pool.

‘Who should know that better than you?’ answered the Oreads. ‘Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.’

And the pool answered, ‘But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist and celebrated wit, who was born in 1854 and died in 1900. He left Ireland to became one of the leading figures of London’s literary and social world, famous for his flamboyant style and brilliant conversation. His poetry includes the early collection Poems, the dramatic work The Sphinx, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after his imprisonment. His major prose and dramatic works include The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Convicted of gross indecency in 1895, Wilde spent two years in prison and died in exile in France, aged forty-six.

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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