Read "Hélas!" by Oscar Wilde online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
To drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, / Is it for this that I have given away / Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll / Scrawled over on some boyish holiday / With idle songs for pipe and virelay, / Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod / The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance / Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod / I did but touch the honey of romance --
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?