Summary
“The Remarkable Rocket”
The King’s son is going to marry a beautiful Russian princess and the people are all in awe of her. One page comments that she was like a white rose before but now she is like a red one. For three days the kingdom rejoices, and then the wedding takes place. It is perfect, and after the banquet there is a Ball planned. The last item on the agenda is to be a magnificent fireworks display because the Princess had never seen a firework before.
A stand is set up in the garden and the fireworks within it begin to talk to each other. A Squib marvels at the yellow tulips in the garden and how great it is to travel. A Roman Candle scoffs that this is a garden, not the wider world. A Catherine Wheel comments that any place you love is the world, but love is not as fashionable as it used to be. The Roman Candle disagrees and says romance never dies.
The three of them hear a sharp cough, which they discern came from a tall Rocket. He clears his throat to get their attention. He begins to speak slowly and distinctly, telling the group that it is very fortunate the King’s son married on the day he is to be set off. The Squib says it is the other way around but the Rocket smiles that he is a remarkable rocket from remarkable parents and his father was a triumph of "Pylotechnic" art. A Bengal Light corrects him with “Pyrotechnic” and the Rocket is not amused.
The Rocket continues, sighing that he hates rudeness and is very sensitive. He hears the Cracker laugh and angrily asks why it does that. It replies that it is happy, and the Rocket is annoyed because it is selfish and everyone should think about the Rocket; after all, he is always thinking about himself. He sniffs that if anything happened to him the Prince and Princess would never be happy in their whole married life.
When someone tells him to be careful not to cry because he cannot get wet, the Rocket admonishes them that he is very uncommon and has imagination. He also has a perfectly developed emotional nature, and does not appreciate how the others simply laugh and are joyous. It is a hollow and empty view of life, and what is the point of being joyous if one day the Prince and Princess have a son and he falls into water and drowns?
The others are confused by the Rocket. One warns him to be careful about staying dry, and the Rocket yells that he will weep if he wants to. He does indeed weep, and the Catherine Wheel admires how romantic he is while the Roman Candle and Bengal Light merely laugh.
Suddenly music and light come from the palace and the King orders the Pyrotechnist to begin. It is a solemn and beautiful affair, and everyone but the Rocket, who is too wet from his tears to catch fire, performs wonderfully. The Rocket is convinced they are waiting to use him for an even grander occasion.
After the show is over the workmen come and see that he failed and toss him over the wall into a ditch. Now in a pile of mud, the Rocket decides to rest. A curious Frog comes over and speaks of how wonderful the mud is and how soon there will be a glee-club performance. The Rocket is irritated that the Frog is talking so much, and calls the Frog ill-bred and selfish. He thinks the Frog should not only talk about himself.
The Frog has already left by the time the Rocket stops criticizing him, and a Dragonfly tells the Rocket this. The Rocket does not care because he likes talking and hearing himself talk. The Dragonfly flies away. A White Duck swims up to the Rocket next and asks about his markings. The Rocket thinks her an uncultured sort belonging to the lower orders.
The Rocket says he will go back to Court because it is too suburban here. The Duck says goodbye and flies off and the Rocket yells at her to stay because he needs to talk to someone. He decides, though, that her mind is too pedestrian.
Two little boys come down to the pile of mud. One sees the Rocket and gasps that it is a cool “Old Stick.” The Rocket is horrified. The boys make a fire and decide the Rocket can help the fire get going. They light it, and fall asleep.
It takes a while but the Rocket finally lights. He is incredibly excited and prepares to set the whole world on fire and make a tremendous noise. He does explode, but no one hears it. The boys keep sleeping. The Rocket gasps that he will create a sensation, and goes out.
“The Nightingale and the Rose”
The Nightingale can hear a young Student crying that the woman he loves said she would dance with him at the Prince’s ball tonight if he brought her red roses, but there are no red roses in the garden. The Nightingale is impressed that he seems like a true lover, and that the songs she’d always sang of love are now embodied in the Student.
Others in the garden wonder why he is crying and think him rather ridiculous, but the Nightingale does not. She flies to a rose tree but he says he cannot help because he only has white roses. Another tree says that his are yellow.
The Nightingale flies to one more tree, and he tells her that he does have red roses but winter has chilled his veins and they will not grow for the rest of the year. The Tree says he knows only one way but it is terrible. The Nightingale replies that she is not afraid. The Tree explains that she must build it out of music in the night and with her heart’s blood. She will sing with her breast against a thorn.
The Nightingale thinks of how pleasant life is, but that love is better than life. She soars into the air and alights next to the Student. She sings to him of how he will have his rose and that all she asks of him is that he be a true lover. The Student cannot understand her, but the Oak-Tree listens and is melancholy.
The Student pulls out notebook and pencil and muses on the Nightingale. He thinks of her as selfish because all she cares about is music; she has style but no sincerity. She does nothing practical.
The Nightingale flies to the Rose-Tree and sings with her breast against the thorn. The thorn goes deeper into her heart and her life-blood ebbs away. A pale rose blossoms as she sings. The Tree urges her on since the dawn is coming, so she presses herself closer to the thorn. The rose petals become pink. The Tree urges her on and the pain is terrible but she sings of Love perfected by Death. Finally the rose becomes crimson, but the Nightingale is faint and choking. She utters one more note and collapses, dead with the thorn in her throat.
The Student opens his window and looks out and sees the red rose. He is elated, and plucks it. He goes to the young woman but she frowns and says it will not go with her dress and jewels are better than flowers. The Student scoffs that she is ungrateful and dashes the flower to the ground. A cart runs over it. The girl tells him he is rude and only a student; after all, another man gave her jewels.
The Student walks away, deciding that Love is useless and only Logic has value. That is what he will study now.
“The Young King”
The night before his coronation the Young King sits in his beautiful chamber, languidly strewn about on his couch, open-mouthed like a young fawn. He had been raised by a goatherd because his mother, the princess, had a secret marriage with one beneath her and the baby was stolen away when it was a week old to be raised by common peasants. The Princess died of either plague or self-administered poison when she awoke to see her son gone. Some said that a handsome young man also died that day of many wounds.
The old King summoned his grandson and acknowledged him as his heir. The boy showed a prevailing interest in beauty almost right away, delighting in jewels and cloth and gold. He wandered around the grounds with his lovely little court pages but sometimes he was alone, feeling that “the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper” (71).
Stories about the boy circulated. Someone said they saw him kiss a portrait, another a marble statue. He was infatuated with the moonlight, as well as all costly and precious materials. He sent merchants all over the world to procure them for him.
Now, though, he is obsessed with thinking about his golden coronation robe, his ruby-studded crown, and his bejeweled scepter. He sees himself before the high altar dressed in the raiment of the King, and his eyes light up.
This evening he is relaxed and admiring of his splendid quarters and the beautiful cathedral outside. A nightingale sings in the garden and jasmine wafts through the air. He feels keenly the “magic and mystery of beautiful things” (73). Midnight tolls, and he falls asleep.
The boy has a dream. He sees himself standing in a long attic amid many looms. Pale, sick children are working them. They are emaciated and exhausted, the air is foul, and the walls drip. The young King goes to a weaver and the weaver angrily says they are working on the king’s robe. He says they have to work to live and toil for the rich all day. They work the grapes but another drinks the wine. The merchants grind them down—men, women, children, and the old. Poverty, Sin, Misery, and Shame are their companions. The young King cries out, and wakes in his chamber.
The young King falls asleep again and has a second dream. He is on the deck of a huge galley rowed by hundreds of slaves. A dark-skinned Master is seated nearby. The slaves are naked but for a loincloth and chained to their neighbor. The ship anchors and the slaves lower one of their own into the ocean to dive for pearls, which he does over and over again. Finally the diver is done, but blood gushes from his ears and nostrils and he falls over dead. The young King is horrified to hear that the Master says these pearls are for the King’s scepter. The young King cries and wakes.
The young King has a third dream. He is walking in a strange wood with beautiful flowers and fruits. Snakes hiss and apes gambol throughout the trees. Many men are toiling in a dried-up riverbed. They dig pits and tear up cacti and swarm up crags.
Death and Avarice watch. Death asks for a third, and Avarice refuses. Death dips a cup into water and Ague rises. She passes through the men and a third die. Avarice beats her breast in horror but Death only laughs and brings Fever in a robe of flame. She also takes many men. Avarice screams that he should go to where people need him but Death laughs again and brings Plague. Now all men are dead.
The young King is horrified, especially when he hears that the men were searching for rubies for his crown.
The time comes for the young King’s coronation. He sees his beautiful robe and crown and scepter and they are even more magnificent than he’d pictured. However, he tells his courtiers to take them away and hide them. The courtiers whisper that he is mad. The young King wonders aloud if they will not know him if does not wear a king’s raiment. He tells them all to leave him except one young page.
The young King bathes himself, then takes a leathern tunic and a sheepskin cloak from when he lived with the peasants, and he takes the rude shepherd’s staff. He plucks a spray of wild briar for his crown.
He goes before his nobles, then out into the city. People laugh at him as a king’s fool but he speaks before the crowd and tells his dreams to them. The people are not impressed and tell him to go back to his palace. The young King’s eyes fill with tears and he returns to the cathedral. Two soldiers say only the king can enter and he says he is the king.
Inside, the bishop is surprised at his apparel. He explains that there are many terrible things that happen in the world and the young King cannot change them. He must go home and make his face glad and wear the proper attire; the world’s burdens are too much for one man.
The young King does not listen and strides up to the alter. He ascends the steps and stands before the image of Christ. He kneels in prayer and the candles burn. Suddenly nobles with drawn swords burst in and ask where is the dreamer, where is the boy who has shamed their state?
The young King continues to pray. He then stands. Sunlight from the stained glass windows streams down on him and his staff blossoms. Sunbeams make a robe around him. His raiment is that of a king’s, and a mysterious and marvelous light illumines him. The Glory of God seems to fill the space, and the people drop to their knees in wonder. The Bishop crowns the young King.
The young King comes down and passes through the people, and none can look upon his face because it is like that of an Angel.
Analysis
“The Remarkable Rocket” is one of several of the tales that depicts a truly heinous and obnoxious figure (the Miller comes to mind, as do the Student, Water-rat, and the Star-Child before his transformation). The Rocket is single-mindedly fixated on himself and thinks everyone else ought to be as well. Interestingly, the Rocket never gets his comeuppance or any measure of awareness. He goes off thinking that he is still a big to-do, though ironically no one sees him at all. Critic John Allen Quintus sees this tale as the most humorous of the collection, but also possessive of a message regarding art and the artist: “the Roman Rocket[‘s]… artistry is only self-serving… [and] the Rocket seems to be the poseur [Wilde] fears he might never rise above.”
“The Nightingale and the Rose” is a much more disturbing, bleak fairy tale, and one that seems ultimately irreducible. Wilde himself wrote, “I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale, for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.”
In the tale, the Nightingale sacrifices herself for Love but it is all for naught, and even worse, there is no real acknowledgment for what she did. The Student does not know what she is doing and, ironically, finds her silly and superficial as he listens to her song he cannot understand, and never gets to dance with his lady, who also turns out to be completely unworthy of the bird’s sacrifice. As critic Matthew Schultz writes, the tale “carries a message of sacrifice that is misunderstood, unappreciated, and ultimately forgotten.” Schultz sees a parallel between the Nightingale’s sacrifice and the Crucifixion, also a sacrifice of life for the unworthy.
Many critics look for homosexual themes in Wilde’s work, including the fairy tales, and although “The Nightingale and the Rose” doesn’t seem to initially suggest them in the same way as, say, “The Happy Prince” does, John-Charles Duffy focuses on the act of penetration that the Nightingale undergoes. While the Rose-tree does indeed penetrate the Nightingale, and that penetration “is described in terms of orgasmic ecstasy and ejaculation,” Wilde has no intention of his readers seeing this as a reproductive, heterosexual, sexualized act. The Rose-tree is described as an “It,” not a male, and the sex act is not reproductive and produces death instead of life. Because of these facts, though, the sex act’s “non-productivity is precisely what ennobles the act: it is motivated by self-sacrificing love, not a desire for personal gain.”
Duffy has much to say about our final tale here, “The Young King.” The young King is first depicted lying on a couch with his mouth open in a position that is “unmanly and erotically charged,” and it seems as if he has just masturbated. The comparison to a Faun evokes the Greek satyrs, who coupled with each other, and the young King’s interest in his lithesome, delicately handsome young pages suggests homosexual relationships. He is the picture of a Victorian dandy with his delight in all things beautiful, and even though it would seem as though that interest was repudiated by his refusal to wear his robe, crown, and scepter, he is still clothed in gorgeous raiment at the end. Also, after the young King moves away from his earlier materialism, “he does not abandon his ‘strange passion’ for male beauty: in the cathedral, the King worships the image of a male Christ as formerly he adored the images of Adonis and Antinous.”
“The Young King” is, like the other fairy tales, a moralistic tale in which the titular character decides it is better to risk censure and even death than to remain self-absorbed, materialistic, and willfully ignorant of others’ suffering. He is an aesthete now made moral; he must accept at least the Christian alternative to the opulence of art. Critic Justin T. Jones suggests that the young King’s revised aesthetic isn’t as deeply felt as it may seem, though, for he will continue to live and rule in the palace. His ceremonial rejection of his magnificent raiment does not mean he doesn’t still “worship in the palace of art,” and “the whole scene at the alter is an enactment of the young King’s fanciful, artistic vision of the event from earlier in the story.” Essentially this is superficial altruism and superficial rejection of the material, for he avoids “the ugly morality of real suffering.”
