Shared in three parts over the course of three weeks, Theodora Allen offers a series of readings of selected poems by Oscar Wilde, James Tate, and Richard Brautigan. From notions of reckoning, introspection, eternity, and temporality, these poems share themes with Allen’s own painting practice.
This week Allen reads The Artist (1894) by Oscar Wilde, prose on temporality and the scarcity of material. A narrative that could easily be projected onto one of Allen’s own ghostly, metaphysical compositions, Wilde’s poem guides his reader through alchemical transmutations, bronze from solid to liquid and back to solid; his story, a meditation on the irony of dismantling a monument to eternity, instead for a monument to something fleeting.
The Artist
Oscar Wilde, 1894
One evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment. And he went forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could only think in bronze.
But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth for Ever.
Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth forever. And in the whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image.
And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire.
And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth for Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment.