Poetry by Oscar Wilde
The title of poem is ‘The Harlot’s House’. It is significant poem as we can predict the plot. But the title doesn’t state the theme directly.The title reflects what is in a poem and contributes to the poem directly.
‘The Harlot’s House’ is a plotted poem. It comprises all the four elements of plot: the exposition, development, climax and resolution.
The exposition takes up lines 1 to 3. It presents the place, time and the main characters of the poem immediately. At the beginning the poem takes place near the Harlot’s house and later moves inside the house. The time is night and the diction – ‘moonlit’ shows it.The main characters are introduced too. The author doesn’t mention their names, they are named as ‘We’.
The development takes up most of the poem. It begins in line 4 and ends with words ‘the house of lust’. In the development we have an action. It presents what is happening inside the house. The characters’ qualities are revealed in the development. The characters have no feelings, they are controled by instincts and by passion because we can find such expressions as ‘lover’, ‘breast’, ‘lust’. The narrator mocks at the people in a poem and uses the similes – ‘like black leaves’, ‘wire – pulled automatons’, ‘a live thing’ and etc. He calls people ‘ghostly dancers’, ‘skeletons’, ‘horrible marionette’, ‘dead’, and ‘dust’. The author compares the to phantoms and shadows. He also uses the irony and the reader can see it from such expressions as ‘ghostly dancers’, ‘slim silhouetted skeletons’ and ‘the slow quadrille’.