Un Enterrement de Sixième Classe                           
                                                                                Bagneux, 3 xii 1900
 
At the graveside there was an unpleasant scene, which none of the principals ever described …
                                                                                                                                       (Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde )
 
What happened at the grave of Oscar Wilde?
One final brawl for precedence, perhaps:
A lurch by Queensberry’s unbalanced child;
Or was it more a general collapse:
Painters and poets, servants, priest and boy,
With Madame Merrill in her heavy veil,
Doctor and journalists and hoi polloi,
Skidding and tumbling down the Paris shale
Into the pit where swaddled Oscar lay?
Verbis meis áddere, quoth the stone,
Nihil audebant; in the old Douai:
They durst add nothing to my words.  What’s known
Is simply this: the funeral was mean.
A clutch of mourners came.   There was a scene.

Julia Griffin


If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Julia Griffin would be pleased to hear them