The Fisherman and his Soul by Oscar Wilde @ Classic Reader
"Love is better than wisdom, and more precious than riches, and fairer than the feet of the daughters of men. The fires cannot destroy it, nor can the waters quench it..."
”The Fisherman and his Soul” is a fairy tale first published in November of 1891 in Wilde’s “A House of Pomegranates”. It tells of a fisherman who nets and falls in love with a mermaid. But to be with her he must shed his soul, which goes off to have adventures of its own.
The idea which lies on the surface is that love is the most important thing in the world. However, there is also a more complicated metaphore of a person being tormented by inner conflicts, being split into body, heart and soul, each having its own desires.
An extremely complicated article analizing Wilde's fairy tale:
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