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This is a 3 page paper that provides an overview of Wilde's "Helas". Themes of Victorian hypocrisy are illuminated. Bibliography lists 0 sources.
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3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KW60_KFlit080.doc
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of emotional passion, which are seen as base in comparison. Victorian society held to the idea that one could only achieve intellectual or moral wisdom by refraining from embracing or
entertaining the passions, and that if one did give into passions, ones soul was corrupted in some sense, and became cut off from more "proper" pursuits. Notably, Wilde chooses
to address this topic in a rhetorical form that is very much the province of the respectable Victorian upper class, a Petrarchan sonnet that begins with two quatrains establishing a
proposition, and then a series of three couplets that comprise a resolution to that proposition. The tone is one of personal agony and strife, that of a soul facing an
agonizing problem that seems to put ones own personality at odds with itself, and actively seeking a solution to synthesize the two parts of that personality: the intellectual and virtuous
part, and the passionate and emotional part. In the opening lines, Wilde introduces the stultifying problem he faces, that by embracing his passions, he has "given away mine ancient wisdom
and austere control" (3-4). In the second quatrain, he elaborates on the stark division this has created in his soul by comparing his own life to a "twice-written scroll", bearing
marks from both a pursuit of intellectual virtues, and a pursuit of emotional passion and romance (5). In the resolution, Wilde invokes the theme that this dichotomy at the heart
of Victorian society is fundamentally unjust; he questions why since "with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance", he must then give up "a souls inheritance"
(12-14). Wilde employs a number of powerful rhetorical and poetic devices in order to emphasize this theme over the course of the poem. The primary aesthetic device on display
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