In the Forest

Out of the mid-wood’s twilight 
    Into the meadow’s dawn, 
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed, 
    Flashes my Faun! 

He skips through the copses singing, 
    And his shadow dances along, 
And I know not which I should follow, 
    Shadow or song! 

O Hunter, snare me his shadow! 
    O Nightingale, catch me his strain! 
Else moonstruck with music and madness 
    I track him in vain! 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“In the Forest” appears in the “Uncollected Poems” (1876–1893) section of the volume Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in 1909 by Methuen & Company. During the 1890s, Wilde faced three criminal and civil trials due to his relationship with the poet Lord Alfred Douglas. In March 1946, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published the article “Oscar Wilde’s Poetry as Art History” by American poet Edouard Roditi, who wrote: “The evolution of Wilde’s descriptive style in his poetry, from the museum-piece ornateness of his earlier works to the simpler and more delicate art of his more mature poems, was accompanied, moreover, by an analogous evolution of his poetry’s intellectual content, from the discussion of general problems of politics, ethics or esthetics to a greater attention to personal impressions or to the elucidation of particular problems of the poet’s life, such as his temptations and moral conflicts. […] Wilde proved his ability to compose, had he but dared, a body of poems, on themes of sin, suffering and remorse, which might have been the Fleurs du Mal of English literature, with much of Baudelaire’s concise quality as opposed to Swinburne’s vagueness.”