1. Introduction

The three-quatrain poem “Symphony in Yellow” came from under the pen of O. Wilde, the outstanding English and Irish poet and playwright of the XIXth c., and distinctly reflects on his involvement in the aesthetic movement (with which yellow colour is associated, by the way).

2. Brief interpretation

This is a sketchy description of autumn (some argue it’s spring) in London, emphasizing the light “yellow” patina on everything, that can be regarded as creating the atmosphere characteristic of this time of the year.

3. The phonetic level

The poem is written in iambic tetrametre, with occasional inverted (trochaic) feet (crawls like, shows like), that create a fluctuating pace, making the poem less canonical. The rhyme is framing and mostly male, except for the dactylic ‘butterfly’ and ‘passer-by’; sometimes imperfect (butterfly / passer-by, eye-rhymes hay / quay, wharf / scarf).

Alliteration: Bridge big barges butterfly, Silken scarf, Flutter feet, Lies like, Rod of rippled.

Consonance: major L, echoing the name of the dominant colour, and rendering the poem a smooth, stream-like flow (cf. the image of the Thames):

Crawls like a yellow butterfly

Shows like a restless little midge

Big barges full of yellow hay,

And like a yellow silken scarf,

The yellow leaves begin to fade,

And flutter from the Temple elms,

And at my feet the pale green Thames

Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

Assonance: an interplay of [i] and [e]: little midge, yellow hay, silken thick, temple elms, feet the pale green Thames, rippled jade

4. Vocabulary

The choice of words is rather sophisticated (mostly literary words), to express rich images (rippled jade, flutter, Temple elms), with the predominance of concrete nouns. All the words (exc. passer-by) are morphologically simple.

5. The lexical level

The poem is a performance of a sort, with a number of ‘actors’ to which the author’s attention turns. They are: the omnibus, passers-by, big barges, fog, leaves, the Thames. The fitting scenery for the characters is also provided: the bridge, the wharf (the quay), the elms.

One could also speak about ‘clothes’ for the characters, represented in similes and many epithets. Two similies in the first stanza (like a yellow butterfly, like a restless little midge), both involving dynamic images of summer insects, are used to characterize the omnibus and an occasional passer-by, making them look volatile and transient (this feeling, by the way, is supported by ‘here and there’). Simile is an important SD here, occurring again in the 2-nd and 3-rd stanzas (like a yellow silken scarf, like a rod of rippled jade) to characterize the fog and the Thames. Very noticeable is the wide use of multisensory epithets (yellow – 4 times, pale green =yellow + blue, consider also nouns jade = green-grey-blue and hay = yellow, restless little, shadowy, silken, rippled). On the whole the epithets and the words ‘fog’, ‘flutter’, ‘fade’ are aimed at setting up an ethereal, transparent atmosphere of an autumn morning.

The poem is full of different kinds of movement (crawls, shows, are moved, flutter, ripple), combined with suspense (hangs, fade, lies), also typical of autumn days.