The velvet was green and the sunflower bright,
When the prince of the wit stepped into the light.
He conquered the salons of London’s high breed,
With a epigram sharp as a flashing rapiere.
He was Oscar the golden, the monarch of prose,
Who wrapped the dark world in the leaf of the rose.

He wrote of Dorian, beautiful, cold,
Whose canvas grew rotten as he grew unsold.
He wore his bright genius like silk on his arm,
And held the whole city in thrall to his charm.
Until the dark evening his destiny spoke,
And the brilliant illusion completely awoke.

× × ×

For into his theater of laughter and pride,
Came Lord Alfred Douglas to walk by his side.
“Bosie,” the beautiful, reckless young spark,
Who dragged the great writer deep into the dark.
A love that was fierce, and forbidden, and blind,
That poisoned the courtrooms and shattered the mind.

The Marquess of Queensberry, brutal and old,
Left a card at the club where the secrets were told.
He called him a sodomite, open and plain,
And Oscar’s proud spirit exploded in pain.
With his visor wide open, refusing to fly,
He sued the old Marquess beneath the gray sky.

He stood in the dock with his eloquence grand,
Defending the love that is banned in the land.
“The love that dare not speak its name,” was his cry,
With his head held up high as the gavels went by.
But the law was a monster of iron and stone,
That stripped him of glory and left him alone.

× × ×

They threw him in Reading, a cell in the gray,
Where they broke his proud body and took his display.
He cleaned his own bucket, he wept in the dark,
And the gray hand of sorrow put out the bright spark.
Yet out of the torment and out of the wrong,
He wrote the sad Ballad, his ultimate song.

He came from the prison a phantom of shame,
With a penniless pocket and aliased name.
In a cheap Paris bedroom, he drew his last breath,
And quipped to the wallpaper, courting his death.
The wallpaper’s winning, he said with a sigh,
And closed the great book of his permanent sky.

× × ×

The martyr of passion, the prince of the wit,
Who took the full blow where the hypocrites sit.
They broke the frail vessel, they shattered the man,
But his words live forever where beauty began.