Exegetical Commentary to Ode to Oscar Wilde

Exegetical Commentary to the Ode to Oscar Wilde of Scylla vom und zu Karybdis
by Enid Evenson Haddow de Burke


The legacy of Baroness Scylla vom und zu Karybdis in the world of literature is too well-known to require amplification here. She never ceases to stagger. And so it is when Scylla takes on one of the greatest tragedies of modern, if not all, time - the life of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Born into a privileged home, educated at Oxford, Oscar's innate, virginal talent was so overwhelming that he burst upon the drab Victorian society of his era like an hellenic sun-god, adorned in finest raiment, adored, radiant. Naturally, this aroused jealousy, provoking what I like to call the "nattering of the philistines".

Oscar entered into an innocent friendship with a younger man, Lord Alfred Douglas, affectionately known as Bosie, son of the evil Marquess of Queensberry. This crude man, backward even for his day, disliked Oscar's very aesthetic influence upon his son, Bosie, and made unfair, slanderous accusations designed to tear them apart. And so it came to pass.

Deemed to have committed unspecified "crimes against nature," Oscar was sent to prison. There he wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", followed by the dazzlingly deep "De Profundis". Upon his release, spat on in the streets, pilloried by press and pulpit, he went into exile in France and Italy, never again to return to his beloved England.

Times have certainly changed! Contemporary academicians are now unstinting in their praise of the Wildean oeuvre, ranking Oscar's play "The Importance of Being Earnest", along with Shaw's "Arms and the Man", as the two greatest English language works of the past century and a half.

Society, in the meantime, pursues its blind, savage course with utmost disregard for all that is beautiful and lofty in Life. Ensuing generations have given themselves over to blood-lusts, such as Hemingway's incessant running-on-of-the-bulls, with endless bingeing on alcohol - the exploits of the so-called "Lost Generation", named by lesbian jewess Gertrude Stein, whose sole contribution to literature was a single sentence, the mindlessly repetitive "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"! And was Ms. Stein called to task for her own public wallowings in perversion? Ha! Certainly not! No more than today's shabby, shallow entertainment jesters - Ellen DeGenerate and Rosie O'Donnell - always lesbians! Let the good times roll in Lesbianville! (I think I feel a jingle coming on - Who put the G in the GLBT?! Perhaps George Soros can pay to have Sigmund Freud exhumed and reanimated to explain it to us --

But, ah ... returning to our principal theme, we find ourselves, like Alice through the Looking Glass, venturing into a land unlike any other, where the mind of one of the most brilliant thinkers of our time trains her powers of unexcelled perception, as can she alone, upon the Eternal Unfoldment of the Sokrates-Mythos, this greatest, this Greekest, of all Tragedies. I now give you - Ode to Oscar Wilde.

Enid Evenson Haddow de Burke
Literary Advisor to the Queen