This sonnet bearing a title in French is full of dark forebodings on the part of the lyrical I: What else could November fogs not only trigger in London, where he presumably wrote this poem? Wilde knew the English metropolis as well as the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, while writing and music also have their parts. Apparently, Wilde composed it just before the publication of his Poems in 1881, using it straight away as a kind of preamble. It includes allusions to the Romantics, the Old Testament and Walter Pater (1839-1894), one of Wilde's providers of ideas at Oxford as well as an early foreboding of Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Translated and adapted from p. 183 of the collection).

Hélas !

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,

Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom and austere control ?

Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll

Scrawled over on some boyish holyday

With idle songs for pipe and virelay

That do but mar the secret of the whole.

 

Surely there was a time I might have trod

The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance

Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God :

Is that time dead ? Lo, with a little rod

I did but touch the honey of romance––

And must I lose a soul’s inheritance ?

 

(1881)