Sonnet to Liberty
Sonnet to Liberty - form Summary
Sonnet Upends Its Rhetoric
Wilde’s sonnet adopts the tight sonnet form to stage a paradox: the speaker disavows affection for ordinary devotees of Liberty yet is exhilarated by the chaos and extremes Liberty produces because they reflect his own passions. The poem balances ironic distance with genuine solidarity, admitting moral ambivalence while siding emotionally with revolutionary suffering. The sonnet’s compact structure intensifies the tension between aesthetic thrill and ethical sympathy.
Read Complete AnalysesNOT that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,-- But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,-- And give my rage a brother----! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved--and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things.
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