Phedre (To Sarah Bernhardt) | A poem by Oscar Wilde, 1881

Sarah Bernhardt photographed by Nadar, 1865

How vain and dull this common world must seem
To such a One as thou, who should’st have talked
At Florence with Mirandola, or walked
Through the cool olives of the Academe:
Thou should’st have gathered reeds from a green stream
For Goat-foot Pan’s shrill piping, and have played
With the white girls in that Phaeacian glade
Where grave Odysseus wakened from his dream.

Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay
Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again
Back to this common world so dull and vain,
For thou wert weary of the sunless day,
The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,
The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.

Oscar Wilde, Phedre (To Sarah Bernhardt), 1881

This poem illustrates Wilde’s connection to the Paris literary and cultural scene by alluding not only to Victorien Sardou‘s popular melodrama dealing with a subject of classical mythology (Phaedra and Hippolytus), but to the famous actress who whom it is dedicated.

Sarah Bernhardt was among a pantheon of powerhouse actresses Wilde admired and artistically stalked, and whom he coveted for his own plays. For instance, in 1890 he managed to convince Sarah Bernhardt, a superstar (along with Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry, and a handful of other actresses whose personae and fashions Wilde loved), to play the title role of his only French-language play, Salome, in London. (Some scholars even believe he wrote it in French just so that he could ask Bernhardt, who spoke no English, to act it.) The play was banned before she could ever take the stage, but rehearsals were already under way.

This poem stems from the time Wilde was not really famous yet (but Bernhardt was at the height of her fame–Sardou’s Phèdre became one of her signature roles) and may have represented an attempt to flatter and “woo” her. Note the mix of classical and modern imagery in the poem–it seems to align Bernhardt with the Greeks and set her above the “common” modern world, making her, artistically speaking, an “ancient” aesthetic type. And we all know how much Wilde valued the Greeks, so in Wilde’s mind, this is probably the highest compliment he could give Bernhardt. (…)

Also:
Letter to an Oxford student on the uselessness of art | Oscar Wilde (1891)
Life is not governed by will or intention | Oscar Wilde (1890)