The best-known poem of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), perhaps the only poem of Wilde’s with any public recognition, is “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898): “all men kill the thing they love.” And maybe that’s fair. Wilde was a genius showman and a genuine literary talent. From his novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891), to his play, “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895), to his underrated fairy tales, he could always write — and thus allow the boastfulness of the “Oscar Wilde Show” that was his meteoric rise and devastating fall on the stage of late-Victorian England’s public life.

What he wasn’t was a consistent poet. But today’s Poem of the Day, “Requiescat,” shows something of his talent before his death from meningitis at the age of 46. Appearing in his 1881 collection, the poem was prompted by the death of his younger sister Isola, who died of meningitis in 1866, at the age of nine. He always had a sentimental streak — his beautifully written 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” manages to sentimentalize both Christianity and Marxism in some syrupy attempt to blend the two — and Isola, who died when he was 12, was a constant object of his sentimentalizing. 

That ought to promise something unreadable — a sentimental occasional poet writing about his beloved sister’s death — but “Requiescat” proves to be a fine and controlled performance. In quatrains rhymed abab, alternating three- and four-foot lines, Wilde gives a universal statement of grief.

Requiescat
by Oscar Wilde

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.