Oscar Wilde's “Impression du Matin”

A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis

As far as artistic merit is concerned, poetry is not Wilde’s strong suit. However, the great Irish writer left us a wonderful relic with his simple “Impression du Matin,” a poem that places Wilde in the tradition of musical and artistic impressionism and gives us the feeling of a painting by Monet or a piece by Debussy. Let’s give it a read.

Impression du Matin

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
    Changed to a Harmony in grey:
    A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down
    The bridges, till the houses’ walls
    Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.
Then suddenly arose the clang
    Of waking life; the streets were stirred
    With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,
    The daylight kissing her wan hair,
    Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

The poem’s French title—“Morning Impression”—is perhaps intentionally misleading, leading us to expect a scene drawn from the streets or the salons of Paris; what we receive instead is a portrait of the River Thames, placing us immediately in Wilde’s London. Wilde’s diction evokes both a musicality and an artistic temperament, with words such as “nocturne” and “harmony” evoking the piano pieces of Debussy, and descriptive colors—“blue,” “gold,” and “grey”—channeling the canvases of Monet. The river is at once a painting and a musical composition, creating a synesthetic experience for Wilde’s readers as sound is blended with sight. The reader receives two distinct impressions of the River Thames in the first stanza, the first majestic in its blue and gold, the second more gloomy in its grey, representative of two opposing facets of London.

If such a movement as poetic impressionism exists, Wilde is perhaps its paragon. With its consistent iambic tetrameter, the poem feels like a set of notes or brushstrokes hastily yet playfully composed, close enough to iambic pentameter to be in dialogue with the English poetic tradition yet not rigid enough to wholly embody it—one might recall the experience of regarding a Monet alongside a Raphael. Iambic tetrameter appears in many lines throughout Coleridge’s “Christabel,” a deceptively simple nursery rhyme that soon turns nightmarish.

“Impression du Matin” is thus at once evocative and rudimentary. Its rhyme scheme is consistent throughout, adhering to a standard ABBA pattern in all four stanzas. But Wilde’s use of enjambment—sentences that spill from one line to the next—reinforce the sense of impressionistic immediacy. The first stanza flows directly into the next; at this stage of the poem, he describes a “chill” and “cold” yellow fog, creating a sort of sensual experience.

We can compare the second stanza of “Impression du Matin” to a stanza from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

It is possible that Eliot draws on Wilde’s description of London in his own rendition of the city as it appears in Prufrock’s imagination (I presume here that Prufrock inhabits London). The parallel diction and tone are indeed stunning, with both poets presenting the “yellow fog” as a personified entity that ominously roams the city. The fog seems to examine the enigmatic infrastructure that exemplifies modern urban life and creates a sense of alienation in both poems. Wilde’s London—just as Eliot’s will be some decades later—is at once familiar and alienating.

In the third stanza, the poem moves away from its more materialistic descriptions as it tackles “waking life.” The emerging bird sets the stage for the final stanza, which introduces a human figure in the form of a “pale woman.” The woman stands “alone” and thereby augments the feeling of alienation that we receive throughout this picture of urban London. Given the manner in which this woman appears, she seems to almost blend in with the description of the city and become one with its inanimate elements. Her “lips of flame” recall the “glistening roofs” in the previous stanza, and the final words of the poem inform us that she has a “heart of stone.” Thus she becomes virtually indistinguishable from her insentient surroundings, which highlights the mechanical nature of urban life and the insignificance of man in the face of that which he has artificially created.

Is Wilde’s poem thus merely a morose picture of city life? Certainly it dwells on the loneliness of London, but perhaps its arch rhymes and consistent rhyme scheme suggest that there is wonder still to be found in such a world—if only one is perceptive enough to find it.