The Sphinx
By Oscar Wilde
Narrated by Denis Daly
First published in 1894 in a limited edition, The Sphinx, which is one of Wilde’s longer poems, evokes images of a ruined and antique past, and has obvious similarities with poems by earlier authors dealing with historical reminisence, like Shelley’s Ozymandias. Resemblences with Tennyson’s In Memoriam have also been noted. It may be seen as a lament about the inevitable decline of beauty into a prolonged senescence of useless ugliness, a theme which is explored in great detail in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The poem is dedicated to the French Symbolist poet, Marcel Schwob.
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