Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"The Harlot's House" by Oscar Wilde is a narrative lyric poem composed in twelve stanzas of varying lengths. Each stanza contains three lines, following a loose AAB rhyme scheme with the first two lines rhyming and the third line typically introducing the next image or idea. The poem employs iambic meter with the first two lines generally in iambic tetrameter and the last line in iambic trimeter.

The poem is a dark reflection on the emptiness and insincerity of the world, conveyed through an eerie scene of a brothel, termed the "Harlot's House". It is a study of contrasts - life and death, love and lust, beauty and grotesqueness.

Stanzas 1-2: The speaker and his lover are on a moonlit street and hear music coming from a house, where dancing is taking place.

Stanzas 3-6: Inside the house, shadows, referred to as ghostly dancers, are seen moving across the blinds. They move like wire-pulled automatons or silhouetted skeletons, dancing a stately dance and laughing. The images suggest an eerie, mechanical and lifeless dance.

Stanzas 7-8: The speaker describes a scene where a clockwork puppet presses a phantom lover to her breast and attempts to sing. A horrible marionette emerges to smoke its cigarette, creating an unnerving image.

Stanza 9: The speaker comments on the dance of the dead with his love. He equates the scene in the house to the lifeless and aimless swirling of dust.

Stanza 10: His love, drawn by the music, leaves his side and enters the house, showing the pull of temptation and the transition of love to lust.

Stanza 11: The scene inside the house changes as the music goes off-tune, the dancers tire of their dance, and the shadows stop their whirling movement. This signals an end to the fleeting, illusory pleasure.

Stanza 12: The speaker closes the poem with an image of dawn, personified as a "frightened girl", creeping down the silent street, which brings a sobering end to the night's escapades.

Wilde's poem uses detailed and evocative imagery to create a scene that is simultaneously fascinating and disconcerting. The dancing figures, more like puppets or automatons than people, highlight the hollowness and artifice in such a place, where genuine human emotions are replaced by a soulless performance.

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...