The best-known poem of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), perhaps the only poem of Wilde’s with any public recognition, is “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898): “all men kill the thing they love.” And maybe that’s fair. Wilde was a genius showman and a genuine literary talent. From his novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891), to his play, “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895), to his underrated fairy tales, he could always write — and thus allow the boastfulness of the “Oscar Wilde Show” that was his meteoric rise and devastating fall on the stage of late-Victorian England’s public life.

What he wasn’t was a consistent poet. But today’s Poem of the Day, “Requiescat,” shows something of his talent before his death from meningitis at the age of 46. Appearing in his 1881 collection, the poem was prompted by the death of his younger sister Isola, who died of meningitis in 1866, at the age of nine. He always had a sentimental streak — his beautifully written 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” manages to sentimentalize both Christianity and Marxism in some syrupy attempt to blend the two — and Isola, who died when he was 12, was a constant object of his sentimentalizing. 

That ought to promise something unreadable — a sentimental occasional poet writing about his beloved sister’s death — but “Requiescat” proves to be a fine and controlled performance. In quatrains rhymed abab, alternating three- and four-foot lines, Wilde gives a universal statement of grief.