Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on this first book, but on half a dozen poems that include 'The Harlot's House,' 'A Symphony in Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' and alone are worthy of a place beside his work in prose. But, though poetry is rare in it, it will presently be recognized that the first books of few men are so rich in autobiography. We have seen that the book is an index to his reading: let us see now how many indications it gives us of his life. Threaded through the book, between the longer poems, runs an itinerary of his travels in Italy and Greece, written by a young man very conscious of being a poet, and keenly sensible of what it was fitting he should feel. In Italy, for example, he thought that he owed himself a conversion to the Catholic faith:-- "Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold, I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide his face." He wrote almost as a Catholic might write, and spoke of the Pope as "the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God." But later, when "The silver trumpets ran across the Dome: The people knelt upon the ground with awe: And borne upon the necks of men I saw, Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome," he turned, as a Puritan might have turned, from the emblem, triple-crowned, and clothed in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty, to remember a passage in the gospels: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-exultant vision of his own iniquity, this undergraduate of twenty-three:-- "My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand." Yet he took hope:-- "My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw, Nathless I threw them as my final cast Into the sea, and waited for the end. When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw From the black waters of my tortured past The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!" He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in Christianity. He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in 'The Burden of Itys':--