The Destroyer of a Soul
- I hate you with a necessary hate.
- First, I sought patience: passionate was she:
- My patience turned in very scorn of me,
- That I should dare forgive a sin so great,
- As this, through which I sit disconsolate;
- Mourning for that live soul, I used to see;
- Soul of a saint, whose friend I used to be:
- Till you came by! a cold, corrupting, fate.
- Why come you now? You, whom I cannot cease
- With pure and perfect hate to hate? Go, ring
- The death-bell with a deep, triumphant toll!
- Say you, my friend sits by me still? Ah, peace!
- Call you this thing my friend? this nameless thing?
- This living body, hiding its dead soul?
- Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867–1902)
Lionel Pigot Johnson made many important contributions to literature at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. He enjoyed a friendship with
William Butler Yeats and published an acclaimed critical study of
Thomas Hardy. Yet his act of greatest literary consequence was the introduction of his friend, the young Lord Alfred Douglas, to Oscar Wilde in 1891 and the general consensus is that the
Destroyer of a Soul was Oscar Wilde.
The soul was that of Lord Alfred Douglas whom Johnson had introduced him to at his home in Chelsea. It's a sonnet of concentrated hatred, strong evidence of Johnson’s conversion the same year to the Catholic faith.
Homosexuality was just beginning to be understood the Victorian era society of England and Johnson was completely mortified; his personal beliefs causing him to denounce this behavior. Wilde's corruption of the boy, led to the famous charges by Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensbury, which initiated the legal process ending with Wilde imprisoned at hard labor in Reading Gaol.
Sources:
Decadence:
cal.jmu.edu/aleysb/decadenc.htm
Destroyer of a Soul, by Lionel Pigot Johnson:
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/010315.htm
Johnson, Lionel Pigot:
www.bartleby.com/65/jo/JohnsonLP.html
Public domain text taken from The Poets’ Corner:
www.theotherpages.org/poems/2001/johnson0102.html
CST Approved.