'Café Royal’ is a poem about memory and the past, and like so many other poems in Mean Time, it suggests that the ways in which we think about the past are vitally important in informing our ideas about the present. It is significantly placed among the love poems of the volume—between ‘First Love’ and ‘Crush’. The placing between a poem remembering first love and one remembering the passion of infatuation is helpful in suggesting how Duffy may have intended the poem.

The poem centres about the life of the playwright and writer Oscar Wilde. One of the founders of the Aesthetic movement, Wilde dressed flamboyantly, and was a famous wit and dandy. He is perhaps most famous for his bisexuality, and the way in which his lifestyle brought him into conflict with accepted Victorian sexual mores, and the law that dictated that homosexual relationships were illicit. Although married, with two children, he pursued a series of affairs with young men, most notably Lord Alfred Douglas, or ‘Bosie’. In 1895 Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, having failed successfully to confront Wilde in person left a card at Wilde's club addressed: "To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite" (sic). Wilde, taking it that the writer meant "Sodomite," sued for libel. However, after a sensational trial, he lost, and was later sentenced to two years' hard labour for ‘homosexual practices’, on the basis of the evidence dug up by Queensbury and his lawyers. Sent to Wandsworth Prison in November, 1895, Wilde was subsequently transferred to Reading Gaol. Bankrupt and ruined in health, Wilde left prison in 1897 and settled, bitter and broken, in Paris. For more information about Wilde, visit the Victorian web at http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/decadence/wilde/wildeov.html

Café Royal

The Café Royal is a London restaurant, which was established in 1865 by a Parisian wine merchant. To the Bohemians of the 19th century it was a French gastronomic oasis in the midst of Victorian London and to the foreign exiles of that age it was a haven of good food and great wines. It was a favourite haunt of Wilde and his friends, and is still a prestigious place to eat. Just before the momentous decision to sue Queensbury, Wilde met his friends Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw here, and they tried to persuade him not to risk his reputation (see below). 

He arrives too late to tell him how it will be

The protagonist of the poem, the central figure, is a young man who is fascinated by Oscar Wilde. Coming into one of Wilde’s favourite haunts, he thinks about his knowledge of Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment, and about how useless that knowledge is, since he cannot warn Wilde of what is to come.  There is also a sense here that he wants to tell Wilde how it will be in the twentieth century—not only will Wilde be redeemed, be famous, but his sexual preferences will no longer be thought to be scandalous.

Hock

A British term for German wines of the Rhine. The name originates in Hochheim, a wine-producing region of Germany, which once sold most of its fine  Riesling to avid British white wine consumers, Queen Victoria among them. The wine, and its trademark bottle, eventually came to be known simply as "hock." Traditionally, the bottles were amber brown in colour.

In the style of an earlier century

The protagonist, in the twentieth century, imagines himself in the nineteenth, sipping wine in the way that he imagines Wilde and his friends did.

Clocks

Another reminder of the time which has passed between the time of Wilde, and the present moment of the poem. The clocks, it is implied, are the same clocks that Wilde would have known and looked at.

He would like to live then now

He, living now, would like to go back and live in the nineteenth century, the time he imagines as more elegant and artistic than the present, and associate with Wilde and his friends.

Suddenly find himself early

Both for the meeting, and as opposed to ‘too late’ in l.1

Harris

A friend of Wilde’s, Frank Harris was one of the people present at a crucial meeting for Wilde in the Café Royal. Wilde had announced his intention to sue for libel when he received Queensbury’s card. Harris, among others, advised him that he was likely to lose, and consulted various people on Wilde’s behalf, including someone in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who agreed with this assessment of the case. Still undecided, Wilde agreed to meet Harris on the 25^th March at the Café Royal, where Harris was already planning to lunch with other contributors to the Saturday review, including Shaw (see below). When Wilde arrived, Shaw offered to leave, but Wilde asked him to stay. Harris and Shaw tried to persuade Wilde that his best course was to move to Paris for the time being, and revenge himself upon Queensbury by writing letters to The Times, rather than pursuing him through the courts. As Wilde was almost persuaded, Bosie arrived, and listened to Harris’s arguments. Harris reports that he then ‘cried with his little white, venomous, distorted face, “such advice shows that you are no friend of Oscar’s”’. Bosie walked out, Oscar followed him, and was swayed to his point of view. For a more detailed account of this meeting see Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde p. 416.

Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the famous Irish playwright, and Wilde’s countryman. Present at the meeting with Harris in the Café Royal (see above)

Biding his time

Waiting, especially waiting for something special, or the appropriate moment to do something. In this case, waiting for the arrival of his hero, and the chance to speak with him at the critical moment.

Lord of Language

Oscar Wilde himself. Wilde’s command of language was famous. He was a master of the quip and the epigram, and famous for his witty put-downs of his opponents.

So tall. Breathing

Wilde was well over six foot, unusually tall for the time, and a large, commanding presence. ‘breathing’ emphasises how the fantasy has come alive—a very sensual realisation.

He is the boy who fades away

As Wilde draws up a chair to sit down at the table withn his friends, so the protagonist fades away, ie, fades into the background of the scene. Despite his desire to speak to Wilde, he is too shy to speak or put himself forward in any way in the presence of his hero. Like the biographer, in ‘the Biographer’, who ‘drifted away’ in the imagined presence of his idol, the man’s courage fails, and he ‘fades away’, imagining also that he would not be sufficiently interesting for Oscar Wilde to notice.

A hundred years on

Back in the present day. In the present, he has the courage to speak: in the past he knows he would not have been able to.

Dear, I know where you’re going…

The man’s imagined plea to Wilde. If he were transported back in time to a hundred years earlier, he would have warned Wilde against his next move. Wilde in a sense sowed the seeds of his own destruction by openly challenging Queensbury, urged on by Bosie. The words of the imagined warning are intimate, loving, the ‘dear’ confiding. The young man in a sense imagines himself as an alternative Bosie, one who would have saved Wilde at the meeting with Harris and Shaw, rather than urging him on to his own destruction.

But pays for his drink

Back to reality. Rather than a member of a glamorous ‘set’ of aesthetes, he is a lonely man buying himself a drink. Is there a sense here that everything has to be paid for?

Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’

The wine’s sweet fruit

Hock is often a fine sweet wine. The ‘sweet fruit’ suggests the sweetness of the reverie, as opposed to the bitterness of Wilde’s fate.  Still tasting the wine on his tongue, the man leaves the Café Royal, deciding to leave his fantasy behind as well. Like the speaker of ‘The Biographer’ he has found that his idol cannot be reached.

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It matters how everyone dies

The final realisation of the protagonist—and a crucial one. This is in many ways the central message of the poem. The protagonist is transformed through the imaginative richness that allows him to imagine himself in Wilde’s time, and realises that his intuitive sympathy has a much wider application. He is moved by Wilde’s tragic death, wishes to save him—and yet there may be such tragedies to avert in his own time, perhaps including that of the ‘man in the suit’ who enters the bar as he leaves it.

Half-smiles

An unconscious invitation, perhaps, the half-smile suggesting he is still wrapped in the sweetness of his dreams. He is just enough aware of the other man to make a small gesture of friendship towards him.

A man in a suit

Would the protagonist not normally look twice at a man in a suit? The besuited figure is both the epitome of respectability, and also another reminder of the smartly dressed, older Wilde. He seems to be an older man than the protagonist, who describes himself earlier as a ‘boy’. There is the suggestion that the protagonist, still rapt in his dream of the nineteenth century, may just have missed meeting his Wilde of the present day.

Terrible, wonderful eyes

The respectable man in the suit is momentarily fascinated by the protagonist. Like an ancient oracle, the young man is terrifying to look at, and yet hypnotic. The eyes that attract the man in the suit are eyes that have suffered, they are ‘terrible’ with their knowledge of impotence to save Wilde, and yet they are ‘wonderful’ because of their imaginative richness.