Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    De Profundis
    De Profundis
    De Profundis
    Ebook56 pages1 hour

    De Profundis

    By Oscar Wilde

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    De Profundis is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment. In the letter Wilde considers events leading to his conviction and discusses his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterises as a romantic, individualist artist.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJH
    Release dateMar 29, 2019
    ISBN9788832562347
    Author

    Oscar Wilde

    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 and died on the 30th November 1900. He was an Irish playwright, poet, and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.

    Read more from Oscar Wilde

    Related to De Profundis

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Unlearnable Lessons on My Father’s Deathbed

      Mar 21, 2017

      I was at my father’s side much of the time in his final weeks, a witness to both the gifts and miseries of being near death. Nurses came and went, patient, long-suffering. They sat beside him for hours at a time, dousing spongy lollipops in water and

      5 min read

    • Article

      Housed In Separate Identities

      Sep 6, 2021

      Housed In Separate Identities
      5 min read

    • Article

      Confronting Agony

      Jan 29, 2019

      Confronting Agony
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Myth Of Sisyphus

      Aug 10, 2020

      The Myth Of Sisyphus
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Woman At Home

      Jan 29, 2019

      From the journals of Samuel P. Perceval,bookseller: Covent Garden, Dec. 15, 1974 This spring, I found a curious letter sewn into the hem of a coat belonging to my late great-aunt Florence. Crudely enveloped in what appeared to be a page torn from

      5 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Learning To Walk

      Oct 28, 2019

      Learning To Walk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Soft Blues

      Feb 15, 2021

      Soft Blues
      15 min read

    • Article

      Pozdnyshev’s Address

      Jun 8, 2021

      THE MURDER I COMMITTED—it wasn’t simply the strike of a dagger, at night, on the fifth of October, in a brightly lit living room. The murder I committed is a phenomenon of duration, akin more to slow poisoning than a flashing blade. I dare to hope th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Letter From The Pestilence

      Mar 18, 2020

      Ironically, there’s something democratic in our common situation, the way in which we’re all feeling the same fear, the same uncertainty, the same panic, worry, anger, and anxiety. A solidarity, finally. The post Letter from the Pestilence appeared f

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      Seven New Poems By Walt Whitman …

      Dec 3, 2018

      Sometimes I dream that I am not Walt Whitman,That I am an engineer, or an airplane pilot,Or a schoolteacher, or a soldier, or a traveling salesman,Not a poet living his afterlife through his poems. I enjoy those dreams. I enjoy waking to find they we

      3 min read

    • Article

      Exhaling

      Dec 7, 2021

      Around me are fifty or so men, in whose company I will sit and be silent for ten days. I eye them discreetly, wondering who among them is going through a crisis. Who, like me, has a family. Who’s single, who’s been dumped, who’s poor or unhappy. Who’

      52 min read

    • Article

      From Cantares Mexicanos

      Dec 1, 2023

      Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and

      3 min read

    • Article

      What My Stroke Taught Me

      Apr 6, 2017

      In my memories of the Scottish hospital, the sky is always blue, though I know that can’t be completely accurate. Summer was waning, and as my friends and I had already experienced, Edinburgh was prone to unpredictable storms. Yet, I can’t think of a

      16 min read

    • Article

      The Healing Power

      Dec 12, 2020

      The Healing Power
      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      There was a family of deer that looked something like us.They traveled far with a fierce sense of collective unity.Held their fearless faces absent of cosmic worry, for the most part.And yet something crept in, making the easiest partof being togethe

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Seven-Year Cycle

      Jul 5, 2022

      The Seven-Year Cycle
      8 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      To be the fish on the ladderand not know what it means. To feel the bronzes,the pearls, the greens, but in a contextof pure combat. To fight the literal stream we hurl ourselves into for nodiscernible purpose, other than some moleculesays it will be

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for De Profundis

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      De Profundis - Oscar Wilde

      De Profundis

      Oscar Wilde

      .

      . Suffering is one very long moment.  We cannot divide it by seasons.  We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.  With us time itself does not progress.  It revolves.  It seems to circle round one centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.  Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

      For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.  The very sun and moon seem taken from us.  Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard.  It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart.  And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.  The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.  Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

      A week later, I am transferred here.  Three more months go over and my mother dies.  No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.  Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.  She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.  I had disgraced that name eternally.  I had made it a low by-word among low people.  I had dragged it through the very mire.  I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.  What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.  My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss.  Messages of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection for me.  Even people who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .

      Three months go over.  The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

      Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.  There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.  The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse.  It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

      Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.  Some day people will realise what that means.  They will know nothing of life till they do,—and natures like his can realise it.  When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,—waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by.  Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.  It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek.  I have never said one single word to him about what he did.  I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action.  It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words.  I store it in the treasure-house of my heart.  I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1