0.1 Afterword  (Page 20/25)

o tell me, were you standing by when isis to osirisknelt?

and did you watch the egyptian melt her union forantony?

and drink the jewel-drunken wine and bend her head in mimic awe

to see the huge proconsul draw the salted tunny from the brine?

and did you mark the cyprian kiss white adon on his catafalque ?

and did you follow amenalk, the god of heliopolis ?

and did you talk with thoth, and did you hear the moon-horned io weep?

and know the painted kings who sleep beneath the wedge-shaped pyramid ?

These questions and apostrophes serve two principal purposes. On one level, they deliver the poem's speaker over completely to thetask of "imagining" the sphinx; and so they very quickly become more fanciful, baroque, and more fully eroticized, like those driving Swinburne’s poem“Faustine” (which consciously or unconsciously Wilde’s lines recall). As a result, the sphinx itself—like the implied addressees of such “dramatic”monologues as Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” or “St. Simeon Stylites”—quickly disappears from view, and the poem gives itself up to a purely imaginativeexcursion. On this level, the poem is technically what Tennyson would call a monodrama, and the sphinx itself is merely the catalyst or spark that ignites the speaker's excessive imagination.Consequently, our immediate impulse is to focus critically not on what the sphinx actually is (a question the poem does not answer), but on the dreamlike effects produced “in” the poem's speakerby his confrontation with it. As Regenia Gagnier has observed, at this level the poem is finally a poem of (auto)seduction, ripe for psychoanalysis: "The poem isa poem of excess in the sense that the object of desire is technically absent; the desire compulsively flows from the subject's brain. But the consummatemastery, the style , of having the shy beloved seduce himself must be admired" (Gagnier, 45).

But this is not the only level on which the speaker's mad interrogation of the sphinx can be understood. For Wilde’s speakerpossesses a neophyte’s pretensions to scholarship, and he lives, metaphorically at least, in an ivory tower, as the lines “ dawn shivers round the grey gilt-dialled towers, and the rain/ streams down each diamonded pane ” would seem toindicate. His obsessive questioning of the Sphinx is driven at bottom, then, by an archaeological and historicist impulse, centered on the problem of definingjust what an accurate knowledge of the sphinx might consist of. Insofar as the sphinx exists simply as an object or relic, “ beautiful and silent… somnolent… statuesque, ” its existence constitutes an unbearable enigma to his neophytescholar’s imagination; and his questions are, in one sense at least, historicist attempts to “know” the sphinx using the language of philology and myth,especially insofar as this approach had become a critical reflex among students of archaeology in the nineteenth century.

Like the neophytes at the beginning of Wilde’s play Salome , then, the speaker of The Sphinx poses a series of increasingly monstrous interpretive questions only to find that, no matter how urgently they are posed,those questions remain unanswered: