Ave Maria Gratia Plena
Was this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danae:
Or a dread vision as when Semele
Sickening for love and unappeased desire
Prayed to see God's clear body, and the fire
Caught her white limbs and slew her utterly:
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place,
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
A kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand,
And over both with outstretched wings the Dove.
How many times have we, on a whim, wandered into a church (or any other place of worship) in a bid to find inspiration and only felt disappointment? This all too common experience is the starting point of Wilde's sonnet, the title of which means "Hail Mary Full of Grace," a phrase spoken by the Angel Gabriel when he told the Virgin Mary she would bear a son.
Wilde approaches a statue or painting of the Holy Mother, eager to bear witness to "a scene of wondrous glory," but cries out in dismay, "Was this His coming!' He, denoting Christ, would seem to deserve better. Before we discover what "this" is, however, Wilde describes what he wanted to discover. He was looking for a scene to rival the thrilling excitement of Greek myth, in particular the loves of Zeus, who "fell" on the mortal Danae and Semele.
Neither of their stories ended (or even began) very happily. Warned by the oracle that her future son would kill him, Danae's father imprisoned her in a cave. But wily Zeus, consumed with desire, turned himself into "a rain of gold" and "broke open" the "bars" of her cell. She later gave birth to Perseus who fulfilled the prophesy by striking his grandfather with a javelin. Semele was a priestess of Zeus, who on realizing that her lover was God himself, begged to see his true appearance, but on beholding his "clear body," she burst into flame.
Notice how, as the poem relates Semele's fate, the rhythm changes so that the stress comes down strongly on each initial word, namely "sickening," "prayed" and "caught." This creates a sense of rupture, which then abates as Wilde steps into the "holy place" and the lines resume their iambic flow. In this way, he helps us share the emotion of his religious drama.
The first part of the poem ends with annihilation. The second part opens with, for me, one of the funniest moments in all of Wilde's work. To appreciate why, we need to pause for a few seconds to absorb what has been related to us: violence, rape, and conflagration. And yet Wilde refers to these as "glad dreams"! In this, Wilde captures with superb sarcasm the smug piety of the modern-day pagan. How many film directors, for instance, force us to dwell on scenes of extraordinary brutality, bizarrely pleased with a vision of lust, cruelty, and sadism. Wilde awakens from these fetid dreams to see what is before him with "wondering eyes" and for the first time to know it with his heart. Gazing at the Virgin Mary, he realizes that "the supreme mystery of Love" is astonishing in its serenity. Tantalizingly withheld from our view, her eventual appearance is like a revelation; and what we see is the antithesis of Danae and Semele. Mary is shockingly ordinary and thus hauntingly real. At the Annunciation, she is "passionless," possessing an absolute stillness comparable to the Buddha's.
What does this mean for us? Perhaps when we stand in a "holy place" and feel nothing but a dull embarrassed boredom we need to be patient with ourselves. When we move from a world where images far more graphically sexual than any featured in Greek myth are incessantly flashed at us and we enter the abode of saints, avatars, or bodhisattvas, it's hard to adjust. Yet the more time we spend there, the more we do adjust—the more we give voice to an otherwise silenced aspect of our being.
As we recite the poem, we are taken from the physical to the spiritual, from the whiteness of destruction to the whiteness of creation, from the pillar of fire as Semele burns to her death to the "pale" face of the kneeling Mary as she awaits the spark of life in her womb. Mary's face and the image of the stainless "lily" merge into the purity of the "Dove," the Holy Spirit itself, leaving us with an impression of joy, peace, and light. The Olympian tyrant of old is vanquished, along with his pagan circus of selfishness, spectacle, and squalor. The world is reborn.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and author of short stories.
Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
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