The Yellow Book

Through London’s gaslit veil he walked in green,

a sunflower pinned where others wore the gray,

his tongue a blade no critic’s edge could keen.

He turned the world into a stage of play,

where beauty’s sin was painted pure as art,

and every mask revealed what it would feign.

The crowds first laughed, then tore his life apart—

a marquess, rage, a queen’s unyielding law,

the cell that broke the wit but not the heart.

In Reading Gaol he heard the footsteps fall,

each man’s despair a shadow of his own,

the crimson rose of love condemned by all.

Yet from the wreck a final truth was sown:

each man kills what he loves, and still we live

to praise the rose the prison could not own.

The yellow book still opens—take, forgive—

for in his fall the light grew sharp and bright,

and beauty, once condemned, learned how to thrive.