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The title page, then, obliges us to see the book as a printed and decorative entity, and this impulse is sustained when we begin toread the poem itself. For the further we venture into the book, the more increasingly iconic begin to seem all of its textual elements. As the monasticilluminators of the Middle Ages would have appreciated, no greater example of text as monument could be given than the illuminated “I” that commences thepoem, printed in green. This illuminated capital is among the finest to appear in a trade publication in the nineteenth century, comparable to the bestilluminated capitals printed by such private presses as the Kelmscott Press, the Doves Press, and Ricketts’s own Vale Press in the closing years of thenineteenth century. Its effect here, in juxtaposition with the Caslon capitals used to print Wilde’s couplets, is to estrange or “aestheticize” an alreadyestranged text, making the poem appear all the more monumental and other- worldly. Like the sphinx itself, it occupies a “dim corner,” its “silent” beautyposing an immediate enigma so far as the processes of imagination and cognition are concerned:

In a dim corner...

The width of the engraving block has, significantly, obliged the printer to set “my fancy thinks ” on a separate line typographically, a visible sign of beauty’s capacity to “tease us out of thought.” Even as thepoem commences, the page visibly foreshadows the derangement of the speaker’s mind that will result from his engagement—or failure of engagement—with thesphinx.

But as with Poe’s “The Raven,” this derangement of the speaker’s mind, while hinted at obscurely in the opening lines of the poem,will only become clear retrospectively. And as with many other Victorian dramatic monologues, the opening lines invite us to read the monologue as aninterpersonal or social drama. The fact that the monologue possesses psychological interest for what it reveals “ironically” of its speaker’s mind,or the suggestion that the poem’s addressee might not be as wholly “present” as the speaker believes, will become clear only through hindsight. The openinglines of The Sphinx , then, contain little in themselves to suggest the unsettling psychological toll that the sphinx’ssilence will later take on the poem’s speaker. Thus the poem commences with the speaker confidently imagining that the sphinx, far from being inanimate, issensate, half-human, and can be brought to life if he only poses the right form of address:


come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent, sostatuesque!

come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman andhalf animal!


come forth my lovely languorous sphinx ! and put yourhead upon my knee !

and let me stroke your throat and see your bodyspotted like the linx


.... a thousand weary centuries are thine while ihave hardly seen

some twenty summers cast their green for autumn'sgaudy liveries.


but you can read the hieroglyphs on the great sand-stone obelisks,

and you have talked with basilisks, and you havelooked on hippogriffs.

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Source:  OpenStax, The sphinx. OpenStax CNX. Apr 11, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11196/1.2
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