Wasted Days
Wasted Days - meaning Summary
Youth Wasted While Seasons Turn
Wilde’s lyric portrays a beautiful, idle youth who dreams while summer labor continues around him. The boy’s delicate appearance and dreamy, tearful gaze are set against harvesting fields, suggesting wasted time and missed opportunities. The poem uses the coming night and unpicked fruit as a moral image: beauty and potential unutilized lead to loss. It warns that daydreaming and inaction can render life’s gifts fruitless when seasons change.
Read Complete AnalysesA fair slim boy not made for this world's pain. With hair of gold thick clustering round his ears, And longing eyes half veiled by foolish tears Like bluest water seen through mists of rain: - Pale cheeks whereon no kiss hath left its stain, Red under lip drawn for fear of Love, And white throat whiter than the breast of dove. Alas! alas! if all should be in vain. - Behind, wide fields, and reapers all a-row In heat and labour toiling wearily, To no sweet sound of laughter or of lute. The sun is shooting wide its crimson glow, Still the boy dreams: nor knows that night is nigh, And in the night-time no man gathers fruit.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.