Oscar Wilde

Symphony in Yellow

I was familiar with Oscar Wilde due to his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; it was one of my favorites growing up. The reason I chose this poem was for two reasons. One was because I had never heard of it before and two the simplicity of it. Was it possible that someone as “intricate” as Oscar Wilde could write something so basic? I read this poem as couple of times trying to see what he was saying and every time I read it I could picture the colors he was describing, and I could see the river. Then I thought maybe this is a poem about art. Being an Aesthete, this is exactly what they would have wanted us to see and appreciate. In the first stanza:

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

And, here and there, a passer-by

Shows like a little restless midge”

The wording is so descriptive; to me it seems he wants you to see exactly what he has written. There is no doubt Oscar Wilde was brilliant and quite a character, but I think there was a quiet side that not many people got to see ,because it would have interfered with the persona he as creating.