0.6 1883 draft text of "the sphinx"  (Page 2/4)

The rows of little polished tusks
Between her cruel crescent lips
Are white, and bright, as when one strips
A milky almond from its husks.

Close-coiled within her sombre lair,
I see her like a mezzotint,
Brown-shadowed, with a yellow glint,
Of strange reflections here and there.

Come forth my lovely seneschal
So somnolent, so statuesque,
Come forth you exquisite grotesque!
Half woman, and half animal.

Come forth my lovely languorous Sphynx,
And put your paws upon my knee,
And let me stroke your head and see
Your body spotted like the lynx,

And let me touch your curving claws
Of ivory, and let me grasp
Your tail, that like a monstrous asp,
Curls round your heavy velvet paws.

A thousand weary centuries
Are thine, while I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green
For autumn's gaudy liveries.

But you can read the hieroglyphs
Upon the carven obelisks,
And you have talked with basilisks,
And you have looked on hippogriffs.

Tell me, what memory absorbs
Your dreams, and what analysis
Can draw the secret forth which is
Concealed within those caverned orbs.

O tell me, were you standing by
When Isis to Osiris knelt,
And did you see the Egyptian melt
Her union for Antony The status of this quatrain in the 1883 text is extremely uncertain. It occurs in both earlier and later drafts, but not in surviving parts of the draft with which Wilde returned from Paris. The lack of punctuation after “Antony,” as well as the fact that, with one exception, surviving sheets of the 1883 fair copy draft contain four quatrains to the sheet (the one exception contains two quatrains only), makes it possible that this quatrain was followed, on some sheet now lost, immediately by the quatrain beginning “And drink the jewel-drunken wine…,” as it is in every succeeding draft of the poem and also in the published version (where both quatrains were converted into couplets). But succeeding drafts derive from 1892 or thereabouts -- from the years immediately prior to the poem’s publication -- and no drafts of the quatrain beginning “And drink the jewel-drunken wine…” are known to survive from the 1880s. Moreover , if the present quatrain was followed, on some now-lost sheet, by the quatrain known to exist in later drafts, Wilde’s habit of transcribing four quatrains to the sheet makes it likely that both quatrains were followed in 1883 by an additional two quatrains now lost to existence.

And did you see the Cyprian kiss
White Adon on his catafalque?
And did you bow to Amenalk,
The God of Heliopolis?

And did you walk with Thoth, and did
You hear the horned Iô weep,
And did you know the Kings that sleep
Beneath the porphyry Pyramid.

Lift up your large black satin eyes,
Which are like cushions where one sinks,
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphynx!
And sing me all your mysteries.

Sing to me of the Jewish maid
Who wandered with the holy child,
And how you led them through the wild,
And how they slept beneath your shade.

Sing to me of the odorous
Green eve, when, couching by the marge,
You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge
The laughter of Antinous.