Plays and Poetry of Gay Interest

Sonnets
Lord Alfred Douglas
Publisher: Rich and Cowan
London, UK

Year


 		1935 1st edition       
Cover / size: Hardback/ h 22.7 cm * w 15.1 cm / 83pp

Dustjacket?   no

ISBN: n/a

Arbery Ref:   000865

Condition Good

Boards (dark blue with gilt lettering on spine and embossed front cover): edges and corners sharp; severe discolouring along spine and top of front and rear covers; rubbed through at top of spine; foot of spine has ink library reference PR/6007/086. Front endpaper has library sticker, with references in pencil and ink. One black and white photograph facsimile of handwritten "The Wastes of Time" precedes title page. (It is uncertain if clean page between leaves 11/12 and 13/14 represents a missing photograph or if it was originally bound thus.) Very small ink inscription. Top page edges smooth, dark blue. Leading and bottom edges cut very unevenly. Pages browning slightly but otherwise clean.

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Lord Alfred Douglas: Sonnets (First Edition)

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Plot / Content:

Forty-one poems, plus brief preface by Douglas on the sonnet form. Several were published in the UK for the first time in this volume.

Some of the poems have commentary on when they were written or other pertinent information. None is explicitly gay; In Praise of Shame was quoted in the Oscar Wilde trials, but Douglas comments "I take this opportunity of referring enquirers about its meaning to the last verse of the second chapter of the book of Genesis".



Background / Biography:

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 – 20 March 1945), nicknamed "Bosie", was a British author, poet and translator, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde. Much of his early poetry was Uranian (homosexual / ephebophile) in theme, though he tended, later in life, to distance himself from both Wilde's influence and his own role as a Uranian poet. continued on Wikipedia



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"Unto my bed last night, methought there came / Our lady of strange dreams, and from an urn / She poured live fire, so that mine eyes did burn / At sight of it. Anon the floating flame / Took many shapes, and one cried / 'I am Shame / That walks with Love, I am most wise to turn / Cold lips and limbs to fire; therefore discern / And see my loveliness, and praise my name.'

And afterward, in radiant garments dressed, / With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips, / A pomp of all the passions passed along, / All the night through; till the white phantom ships / Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song, / 'Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest.'"

In Praise of Shame



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