Canzonet
Canzonet - form Summary
Canzonet's Pastoral Musicality
Wilde's poem is a brief canzonet: a small, musical lyric in compact stanzas offering a humble speaker's gift of song instead of wealth. The form's simplicity and refrains foreground melody and pastoral voice while its neat, song-like lines set the speaker against absent mythic figures (Pan, Hyacinth, Hylas). That contrast—plain human offering versus lost classical glamour—gives the poem its elegiac, wistful tone within a restrained, lyrical shape.
Read Complete AnalysesI have no store Of gryphon-guarded gold; Now, as before, Bare is the shepherd's fold. Rubies nor pearls Have I to gem thy throat; Yet woodland girls Have loved the shepherd's note. Then pluck a reed And bid me sing to thee, For I would feed Thine ears with melody, Who art more fair Than fairest fleur-de-lys, More sweet and rare Than sweetest ambergris. What dost thou fear? Young Hyacinth is slain, Pan is not here, And will not come again. No horned Faun Treads down the yellow leas, No God at dawn Steals through the olive trees. Hylas is dead, Nor will he e'er divine Those little red Rose-petalled lips of thine. On the high hill No ivory dryads play, Silver and still Sinks the sad autumn day.
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