0.6 1883 draft text of "the sphinx"

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Many handwritten drafts and draft fragments of The Sphinx survive today, dispersed in various library collections. The earliest of these, together with anecdotal evidence, suggest that Wilde began composing The Sphinx in the 1870s, possibly as early as 1874. Much of the poem was written in Paris in 1883, however, simultaneously with the composition of Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House.” Wilde made many further changes before The Sphinx was eventually published in 1894 (see Afterword).

The following text presents the poem as it existed, or most likely existed, in April 1883, when Wilde returned from Paris with a long (untitled) fair copy draft of the poem, handwritten on De La Rue paper. Only parts of this fair copy draft now survive, however, housed variously at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles (shelfmarks W6721M1 S753 [1894]a and W6721M1 S753 [1894]b) and at the British Library (Add MS 81628). Those parts do not all follow sequentially from one another; they omit whole lines and stanzas that appear in earlier drafts as well as in later ones; and tantalizingly, the final sheet ends with a comma, not a period. Clearly their incompleteness makes the surviving fragments from 1883 unreliable indicators of the text Wilde returned with from Paris. The version of the poem presented here, consequently, is an editorial reconstruction, produced by amalgamating the surviving fragments of the 1883 fair copy draft with earlier surviving drafts and draft fragments.

Even still, the poem as it is presented here contains many variants, both substantive and minor, from the version published in 1894. Chief among those variants are the inclusion of thirteen stanzas subsequently removed from the poem; the absence of eight of the nine stanzas that close the 1894 version; the absence of seven stanzas, inserted in 1893, amplifying Wilde’s description of Ammon and his imagined relations with the sphinx; and finally the delivery of the poem in quatrains, in the lower case, with the second and third lines indented, indicating Wilde’s debts to Tennyson’s so-called “In Memoriam” stanza. By comparing the two versions, readers will doubtless be able to spot other significant differences for themselves.

For a complete survey of extant drafts and draft variants see Poems and Poems in Prose , ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Volume One of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 180-94 and 305-7.

I am grateful to Professor Bobby Fong, President of Butler University, for a great deal of assistance in establishing this text. Also to Merlin Holland for his kind permission to publish material, unpublished in Wilde's lifetime, that remains in copyright.

In a dim corner of my room,
For longer than my fancy thinks,
A beautiful and silent Sphynx
Has watched me through the dusky gloom.

Dawn follows dawn, and nights grow old,
And all the while this curious cat
Lies couching on the Chinese mat
With eyes of satin rimmed with gold.