Themes
Sorrow as revelation
Wilde once lived "entirely for pleasure" and treated sorrow as a mode of imperfection. Prison teaches him that suffering is "really a revelation", not a mystery. Sorrow becomes "the type and test of all great art" because it is the one emotion that wears no mask, and "the secret of life is suffering". He admits that a woman of noble kindness was right to dispute his old belief that the suffering in one London lane proved God did not love man. Now love seems to him the only explanation: "Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul."
Humility and acceptance
The discovery at the heart of the letter is Humility, "the last thing left in me, and the best". It means accepting everything, as Wilde does when his children are taken from him and he kneels, weeps, and finds that the moment "seemed to save me". He refuses both the advice to forget who he was and the advice to forget prison, because "To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development." Even the plank bed and the oakum must be made into a spiritual experience, and he must learn not to be ashamed of having been punished.
Christ as artist and individualist
Wilde's Christ is a poet whose "whole conception of Humanity sprang right out of the imagination". His life is "the most wonderful of poems", his morality "all sympathy", his justice "all poetical justice". He is the first individualist in history, who pitied the rich more than the poor and loved the sinner as the nearest approach to the perfection of man. Wilde reads the Gospels in Greek each morning and plans to write on "Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life". Christ is like a work of art: he teaches nothing, but in his presence one becomes something.
The individual and society
Wilde claims he must be "far more of an individualist than ever I was", and that his ruin came from too little individualism, not too much: his one unpardonable act was to appeal to society for protection. Society turned its laws on him; it inflicts appalling punishment and then abandons the prisoner when his sentence ends. The Clapham Junction crowd, laughing at a handcuffed man, shows a world that only cares for people on their pedestals. Against this he sets Christ's war on the Philistines, and the conviction that "Most people are other people."
Art and the life to come
Wilde traces his new understanding back through his own books, from The Happy Prince to Salome, and finds it "foreshadowed and prefigured" there. He plans to reassert himself as an artist, since one beautiful work could "rob malice of its venom". He hopes a deeper note will enter his art, and hears the cry of Marsyas throughout modern art: "whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be." The letter closes by turning to the sea, the flowers and the Mystical in Nature, where he hopes to be made whole.