An Inscription - Analysis

A small book asking entrance to a larger song

Wilde’s poem is a graceful act of literary self-placement: the speaker sends a little book toward a celebrated musician-poet, hoping this new work might be recognized as kin to an older, more luminous art. The central claim is modest but ambitious: this book wants to be read as an echo of a previous enchantment, a place where the same kind of beauty might appear again. The opening imperative, Go little book, immediately gives the poem a ceremonial, almost courtly tone, as if presenting a gift that knows its own smallness.

The imagined addressee: pearl horns and the “Golden Girl”

The man addressed is defined by a particular kind of music: he sang on a lute with horns of pearl, an instrument made mythic through impossible materials. This detail matters because it frames the whole poem inside a world where art is not merely entertainment but a rare, almost sacred craft. He sang of the white feet of the Golden Girl, and that image combines purity (white) with wealth or radiance (Golden). It is beauty narrowed to a fetish-like focus: not the whole woman, but her feet, suggesting the old lyric tradition that praises a beloved through exquisitely chosen fragments.

Pages as a stage: hope, not certainty

The poem turns from command to request when the book must bid him look into thy pages. What follows is carefully hedged: it may hap and may find. Those repeated maybes create the key tension: the speaker longs for the older artist’s recognition while admitting it might not come. The book is offered as a container that might, if fortune allows, produce the same vision: golden maidens dance through thee. Notably, the beloved singular (Golden Girl) becomes plural (golden maidens), as if the book cannot perfectly reproduce the original song but can multiply its atmosphere into a troupe of shining figures.

A compliment that is also a quiet dependency

Even as the speaker presents the book confidently, the poem quietly admits dependence on prior genius. The new work is defined by what it follows: it goes to him who already made the definitive music. That is both homage and anxiety. Yet Wilde’s final image is not of imitation but of animation: the maidens do not sit in the pages; they dance through them, suggesting the speaker’s hope that reading can make art live again, moving from one artist’s song into another’s book without losing its glow.