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From this time forth, Ostuff of life, you are no more
Than blocks of granite compassed round by some vague fear,
Dozing in the depths of Sahara’s dust;
An ancient sphinx, lost in the world’s disinterest,
Lost on the map, your wild caprice was never sung
Except beneath the luster of the setting sun.
(Baudelaire,139)

While in Paris, Wilde formed a close friendship with the journalist Robert Harborough Sherard, the grandson of William Wordsworth,who would go on to become Wilde’s first biographer. Much of their conversation turned on the work of Baudelaire, Gautier, de Nerval, and Poe (Ellmann, 218)—andindeed the influence of all four writers can be traced in The Sphinx , whose particular debts to Poe’s “The Raven,” as well as to the two poems titled “The Cat” in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil , have frequently been remarked by critics. In Oscar Wilde: The Story of An Unhappy Friendship (1902), Sherard wrote memorably that he personally witnessed Wilde putting the finishing touches to his verse drama The Duchess of Padua in the spring of 1883, as wellas “those two wonderful poems ‘The Harlot’s House’ and ‘The Sphynx’”:

I was with him all the timethat they were being elaborated. I heard him fashion the lines, often repeating, as we walked abroad, passages that had pleased him in their writing…. I rememberthat for “The Sphynx” he asked me for a rhyme in '-ar' for a lagging verse. Ican recall the accent with which he often repeated this request, and chid me with the question “Why have you brought me no rhyme from Passy ?”… On the daywhen I found 'nenuphar' for the wanting rhyme, I was made as proud by his thanks as though I had achieved great things in literature. We may have been preciousand ridiculous, but…neither for him nor for me was there anything outside of literature. (Sherard, 31-32)

In a letter from early April 1883 that demonstrates the intensity of the two men’s shared concern for poetics, Wilde commended toSherard the “Envoi” he had written the previous year, for a volume of poetry by his one-time friend Rennell Rodd, with the words “The rhythmical value of prosehas never yet been fully tested. I hope to do some more work in that genre, as soon as I have sung my Sphinx to sleep, and found a trisyllabic rhyme for‘catafalque’” ( Complete Letters , 205-6). Wilde considered Sherard a fellow poet and aesthete, though there were clearlybonds of love between the two men as well. But at the end of April Wilde returned to London, from where he confessed to Sherard two months later “Notthat I have written here—the splendid whirl and swirl of life in London sweeps me from my Sphinx…. I wish I were back in Paris, where I did such good work”( Complete Letters , 211). By this time, Wilde had produced a second fair-copy draft of the poem, written on quarto sheets, representing “a substantially completed version of the poem”(Fong and Beckson, 306) including thirteen stanzas later omitted from the first published text.

Wilde appears to have been “swept” from his sphinx for at least the next six years. According to Robert Ross, “the poem waspolished and improved in 1889, after [Wilde] unearthed the MS. from an olddespatch box at Tite Street in my presence” (Ross, vii). At some point after 1891, Wilde dedicated the poem to the French Symbolist poet Marcel Schwob, afact that tempts one to associate the poem’s composition with Salome , written in Paris in fall 1891. Schwob was a continual presence in Wilde’s life during the composition of Salome , and he is known to have corrected proofs of the play late in 1892, prior to its publication in French in February 1893. Andcertainly, as we have seen, Salome was much on Wilde’s mind when he contracted with Mathews and Lane for publication of The Sphinx . But Ellmann conjectures that Wilde dedicated The Sphinx to Schwob largely in thanks for his help in proofing and correcting the French Salome , and perhaps also in thanks for Schwob’s earlier dedication of his story “le Pays bleu” to Wilde in 1892 (Ellmann, 346and 374), and no evidence has ever surfaced to suggest that Wilde took up The Sphinx between 1889 and summer 1892.

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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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