Oscar Wilde was a Victorian iconoclast who stood at the vanguard of the aesthetic movement. His works, from his Comedy of Manners plays to his verse compositions such as "Requiescat," have changed the landscape of literature since the late 1800s. Although Wilde's work often takes on a frivolous or ironic tone to lambast societal morays, the poem "Requiescat" ("May She Rest in Peace") represents a rarer somber, personal note in his oeuvre. The poem was written in memory of his sister Isola, and betrays genuine grief at her death. The speaker of "Requiescat" struggles with the finality of his loss, and the inability of poetry to cope with and express such a tragedy.
Wilde exhibits difficulty in comprehending the loss of this young woman's life. He begins with two imperatives in the first stanza: "Tread lightly," he commands the reader, and then "Speak gently." Supposedly these precautionary measures are necessary because the dead girl is still alert enough to "hear / The daisies grow," but obviously this is in fact impossible; by the end of the poem, the speaker changes his mind and concedes that "she cannot hear / Lyre or sonnet." Despite the poet's desire to honor his sister and his wish to believe that she can still hear and feel the world above her, he must ultimately accept that she is gone--or, more euphemistically put, "at rest."
Wilde uses figurative language associated with beautiful flowers and precious metals to vividly convey his sister's premature death. In the second stanza, he recalls the young lady's "bright golden hair," now "Tarnished with rust." The positive rhyming words in this stanza, which represent the girl during her life, are paired together--"fair" and "hair"--while the negative death-related words are also coupled in rhyme: "dust" and "rust." These rhymes strengthen our understanding of what has been lost and what the current situation is.
The flower imagery in the poem illustrates the passing of time and the fleeting nature of the beautiful young woman's life. In the first stanza, we see the passing of the seasons, with the "snow" of the second line giving way to the "daisies" of the fourth line. The young woman's beauty--specifically, her pale smooth skin--is likened both to lilies and to snow in the poem's ninth line. While the image of the flower reminds us of her vital energy while she was still alive, the link between her skin and snow is a chilling reminder of her current state, a cold corpse buried under the earth, impervious to the changing seasons that the narrator experiences in the world above.
According to the grief-stricken narrator, the young lady is now "at rest" and cannot even hear the sad sonnet[s]" he composes for her. Poetry (and the music of the "Lyre") cannot reach her and remedy the situation, nor can they soothe the poet's pain. Art becomes useless, this poem suggests, when it comes up against the deaf and dumb finality of death. The speaker's loved one has literally lost her life, but the narrator comments that in a sense he has lost his life, too, by losing her: the poem concludes, "All my life's buried here, / Heap earth upon it." We might read "Requiescat" as a double elegy, then, both for the girl who has died, and for the devastated poet who is left behind.
