Le Jardin des Tuileries
This winter air is keen and cold,
And keen and cold this winter sun,
But round my chair the children run
Like little things of dancing gold.
Sometimes about the painted kiosk
The mimic soldiers strut and stride,
Sometimes the blue-eyed brigands hide
In the bleak tangles of the bosk.
And sometimes, while the old nurse cons
Her book, they steal across the square,
And launch their paper navies where
Huge Triton writhes in greenish bronze.
And now in mimic flight they flee,
And now they rush, a boisterous band—
And, tiny hand on tiny hand,
Climb up the black and leafless tree.
Ah! cruel tree! if I were you,
And children climbed me, for their sake
Though it be winter I would break
Into spring blossoms white and blue!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
Oscar Wilde’s “Le Jardin des Tuileries” was first published in the charity publication In a Good Cause (Darton & Co., 1885), an anthology compiled to raise money for the North Eastern Hospital for Children in London. About the poem, Robert Mighall, a scholar of Victorian literature, writes in his notes to Oscar Wilde: Everyman Poetry (Everyman Paperbacks, 1998), “The setting is a Parisian park, close to the Louvre. The ideas suggested in the final stanza, that the barren tree should break into Spring blossoms as a consequence of the children playing on it, would be adapted for one of Wilde’s most famous fairy stories ‘The Selfish Giant’ (1888).”
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874 and Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1874 to 1878. At Oxford, he received the Newdigate Prize for his long poem Ravenna (T. Shrimpton and Son, 1878). He also became involved in the aesthetic movement, advocating for the value of beauty in art.