Structure
The first section describes our hero’s immediate state of mind with the image of his empty bed as a grave:
Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head
and as I climb into an empty bed
Oh, well. Enough said.
As if being buried alive, the melancholy protagonist feels that his life may as well be over: I know it’s over – still I cling/I don’t know where else I can go. Perhaps an intense relationship has come to an end, leading to thoughts of despair and suicide, but it may be less obvious. He equates his imagined forthcoming death with a feeling of utter helplessness, but it seems that death is not an option because he finds it difficult to act, as we shall see. So, although the sea wants to take me/the knife wants to slit me, he does not seem to want it. He does ask do you think you can help me? but of whom? His mother? Does he want to be saved from death or released from life? The reader/listener can decide for himself.
In the second section, what follows is an image of a couple on their wedding day: but perceiving the promises made as ultimately pointless, the protagonist identifies with the “sad, veiled bride”, pleading with her to be happy and conceding that she will need a lover, although this will have little to do with love. But perhaps if the “handsome groom” allows her space they might live happily – a modern fairy tale.
Does this scene describe an event that ended the (imagined) relationship, a sensitive, platonic relationship that is rudely replaced by a “loud, loutish lover” at an unspecified time after the nuptials? I think not.
However, if he is jealous of these stereotypes, he seems unable to act to satisfy his needs. In the third section we learn that his agony seems to be due to the realisation of a fantasy that never was:
I know it’s over
and it never really began
but in my heart is was so real
And there are memories of a conversation – but who is speaking: the object of his desire or a voice in his head - his mother’s?
and you even spoke to me, and said:
“if you’re so terribly good-looking
then why do you sleep alone tonight?”
And the answer seems to come from within, as I think does the condemnation:
I know
because tonight is just like any other night
that’s why you’re on your own tonight
with your triumphs and your charms
while they are in each other’s arms...
Every night is the same because he does nothing but dream and delude himself. Does he have a low or over-inflated self-image? Perhaps he can’t decide and is racked with indecision. Does anything else making it so difficult for him to act? I think the final section seems to intimate that those who have no “guts to be gentle and kind” have subjected him to ridicule and abuse: laughter and hatred being “easy” emotions.
In the final lines, the anguish reaches a peak. He states that love is Natural and Real: is he afraid that for such as you and I, my love it is unnatural and imaginary?
Themes
Typically for this writer the themes are unrequited love, isolation, loneliness, helplessness, etc. The Wildean themes are, perhaps, in the mind of the reader/listener. Indeed, the overall vagueness and ambiguity, typical of this author, together with the complexity of the structure allows for a dichotomy of interpretations.
However, I acknowledge David Pinching, writing in his essay Oscar Wilde’s influence on Stephen Fry and Morrissey, when he says that “Wilde represents isolation within one’s own world and a grand set of theories about the most irrelevant and absurd things.”