Muldoon pens poems for Oscar Wilde memorial
Yvonne Chiu Hays
Two poems written by Paul Muldoon, director of the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton, will be unveiled in England next month by the Reading Borough Council in commemoration of the centennial of Oscar Wilde's death.
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A century later, the Reading Borough Council has commissioned Muldoon to write an epitaph to Wilde for a memorial.
Muldoon, the Professor of the Council of the Humanities and Creative Writing, is the 1997 recipient of the Irish Times Literature Prize. He originally hails from Northern Ireland.
The specially commissioned Wilde poems will be a permanent part of the memorial -- a walkway featuring a set of gates that open onto Chestnut Walk, which runs between the prison and the river Kennet. These gates will carry an inscription of Muldoon's poem, "The Gate":
As I roved out between a gaol And a river in spate in June as like as January I happened on a gate which, though it lay wide open, would make me hesitate.
I was so long a prisoner that, though I now am free, the thought that I serve some sentence is so ingrained in me that I still wait for a warder to come and turn the key.
"The phenomenon I describe in the poem is one that is quite familiar apparently to a lot of prisoners," Muldoon said. "When they come out of prison, they say they cannot bear somehow to open a door for themselves. They are so used to the idea of somebody opening it for them, which is a very striking thought, and that's what I hoped to incorporate in that little image."
In addition to the gates, the walk also features a laser-cut fence and three benches, which the artist describes as love seats, that line the river's edge. A wooden plank cast in metal is the only seat on the prison-side of the walk. The plank is the same size as the one on which Wilde slept while he was imprisoned.
Engraved in the bench will be the second poem from Muldoon:
A stone-breaker on his stone bed lay no less tightly curled than Opposite-leaved Saxifrage that even now, unfurled, has broken through, its wall of walls into this other world.
With "The Bed," Muldoon said he was trying to summon up images of hard labor and the sadness and longing of a prisoner.
Muldoon said the poems are somewhat based on the stanza pattern of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," a somber poem written by Wilde about the execution of an inmate.
"I'm delighted to be asked to do these things," Muldoon said, "because it's important that poetry be seen to have its place in the world."
Muldoon and colleagues planning tribute
Another commemoration of Wilde's death will take place in Princeton. At 4:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1, Muldoon and several of his colleagues are planning to pay tribute to Wilde in the Jimmy Stewart Theater at 185 Nassau St. Joining Muldoon will be Michael Cadden, director of the Program in Theater and Dance, and English professors Lawrence Danson, Jeff Nunokawa and Elaine Showalter. Muldoon plans to read these two poems. His colleagues will spend about 10 minutes each addressing Wilde's work.
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