The Sphinx

Wilde worked on versions of the poem for years before its 1894 publication. He had begun a draft during his Magdalen College years at Oxford in 1874 and continued to revise it through his American lecture tour of 1882 and his early London career. The finished text runs to a hundred and seventy-four lines and is composed of eighty-seven long-line couplets. The poem is meant to overwhelm through sound and accumulation rather than tell a clean historical story — reading it aloud is how its rhythm and diction do their work.

The 1894 edition was published in London by Elkin Mathews and John Lane at the Bodley Head, in a limited edition of 200 copies plus 25 signed copies for the American market, at Wilde's own request for an unusually rich book. Charles Ricketts designed the volume: title page, cover, initial letters, and ten full-page illustrations by Ricketts himself. Charles Shannon (Ricketts's partner in life and work) contributed as well. The book is one of the great Aesthetic-movement art objects.

Its imagined Egypt and Near East belong to a European tradition of Orientalism: the poem's catalogue of ancient names, gods, and monsters reveals late-Victorian fantasy about the East, not dependable knowledge of the cultures being named. That is worth stating plainly. The poem's method — accumulation of exotic proper nouns, ekphrastic vocabulary, incantatory couplets — is inseparable from that Orientalist context. Read the poem for what it is: an Aesthetic-movement performance, not a document about the ancient world.

The poem opens in a study, at night. The speaker addresses a small sphinx statue on his desk — 'A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom' — and begins to interrogate her about the men and gods she loved.

The middle of the poem is the long catalogue: the sphinx's imagined lovers across Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, and Christian mythology (Anubis, Adon, Ashtaroth, Amenalk, Osiris, Aphrodite, the Great Sphinx of Giza itself). The catalogue moves through the ancient world for the sake of the catalogue — each name is chosen for its sound and its jewelled decoration rather than for historical or theological accuracy.

The final section turns. The speaker recoils from what he has just imagined, orders the sphinx away — 'Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence!' — and turns toward a wooden crucifix on the wall behind him. The poem's structure is Wilde's characteristic Aesthetic-movement gesture: a long unbroken indulgence in decorated fantasy, followed by an abrupt religious recoil. The recoil is not the poem's argument; it is the poem's final image.