In ‘Charmides’ (1881) and The Sphinx (1894) Wilde explores the possibilities of erotic participation in art. He physically engages the textures of Aesthetic Beauty. Variations of barren collisions and clashes with inanimate bodies in these two poems, as well as in Salomé (1891), are all-pervasive. These erotic clashes are not mere narrative fictions, but operate as mise-en-abyme metaphors for the way the Decadent texts that contain them reach out to seduce the author and the reader. The figuration of sexual perversion leads up to textual perversion, denaturing text into sex and the reverse. Wilde describes a subversive and, at the very least, impossible act; in doing so he addresses the Decadent image as the futile attempt (depending on viewpoint) to convert poetic space into a site of actual, in situ sensuality.

‘Charmides’

‘Charmides’ is the flagship verse of Poems and the longest poem Wilde ever wrote. He declared it his ‘best’ and ‘favourite poem’ (1979: 62). Jean Wilson aligned ‘Charmides’ with ‘Panthea’ as a decadent poem of the ‘gospel of free love’ (1971: 165). Norbert Kohl also acknowledged its significance, writing that ‘Wilde's “morbid streak” does not begin with Dorian Gray but with “Charmides”’ (1989: 26–8). Jerome Buckley traced its laden style and the ‘mood-breaking apology’ of its end to Keats’ ‘Isabella’ (1990: 21). The poem was inspired by the homoerotic implications of Plato's Χαρμίδης (Charmides), a work Wilde would have known through the 1870 translation of Baliol College Master, Benjamin Jowett. The poem in the first part tells of a young Greek sailor who sexually violates goddess Athena's statue inside her own temple. Athena has her revenge by luring Charmides to drown at sea. In the second part, his body is cast ashore and found by a virgin Dryad (wood nymph) who grows enamoured of his beauty and dies as a result of her sexual frustration. Venus, in the third, concluding part takes pity on them and arranges for their sexual union in Hades. Charmides, Athena, and the nymph have no depth of character, but intense bodies. The illogicality of the plot and its deus-ex-machina resolution render the poem purely decorative.