The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde
Quick answer: The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde: full summary with the ending, the soul's three temptations, themes of love versus soul, and the craft of the tale.
A young fisherman hauls in his net and finds a sleeping mermaid in it, and from that catch follows one of the strangest bargains in Victorian fiction: to love her, he must get rid of his soul. The Fisherman and His Soul is the longest tale in Oscar Wilde's 1891 collection A House of Pomegranates, an inverted Little Mermaid in which it is the human who must give something up to enter the sea.
Wilde uses the fairy tale frame to stage a genuinely unsettling argument about love, religion and what a soul is for. The story travels from a fishing village to a witches' sabbath to the bazaars of the East and back to the tide line, and it ends in a double death that somehow reads as victory. Here is the complete plot with that ending, the characters, the themes exams ask about, and the design choice that makes the whole thing work.
The story in brief, ending included
The fisherman catches a mermaid and releases her on her promise to sing to him and fill his nets. He falls in love and begs to join her under the sea, but she tells him he must first send away his human soul. The priest refuses to help, calling the sea folk lost; the merchants offer him a clipped coin for a soul they consider worthless. A young witch, who desires him herself, finally tells him the secret after he dances with her at a sabbath on the mountain: stand on the shore, cut your shadow from around your feet with a special knife, and the shadow, which is the soul's body, will leave you. The soul begs not to be sent away without a heart, but the fisherman refuses: his heart belongs to his love. He dives to the mermaid, and the soul departs.
Once a year the soul returns to the shore to tempt him back. The first year it offers the mirror of wisdom won in the East; the second, a ring of riches; he refuses both, for love is better. The third year the soul tells of a dancing girl in a nearby inn, and because the mermaid has no feet, the fisherman comes ashore for a day to see her. It is a trick. Travelling with his heartless soul, he is prodded into theft, cruelty and finally murder, and learns the terrible mechanics: sent into the world without a heart, the soul learned evil. Worse, the witch's knife works only once; he cannot cut the soul away again. He returns to the shore and lives there in penance, calling daily to the mermaid, who never comes. At last her body washes up dead. Ignoring the soul's warnings as the sea rises, the fisherman kisses her cold lips, his heart breaks, and through the broken heart the soul finally enters him, made one with him as the waves drown him. The priest, who had cursed the sea folk, buries the two in an unmarked corner of the Fullers' Field. Three years later, strange white flowers from that grave cover the altar, and the priest, moved by their beauty, preaches not of wrath but of the God whose name is Love, and blesses the sea and all wild things he once condemned.
The characters and what they want
The fisherman wants love with the totality only fairy tale characters are allowed, and he treats his own soul as an obstacle to it. The mermaid wants him but cannot leave her element; she is desire made literal, beautiful and bodiless in the ways that matter on land. The soul wants a heart, and its yearly temptations are also petitions; denied a heart, it becomes cruel, which is the story's most pointed piece of psychology. The priest wants doctrinal tidiness and is the last character to be converted. The witch wants the fisherman and helps him ruin himself, a small masterpiece of spite dressed as generosity.
Themes and meaning
The headline theme is the conflict between love and soul, body and spirit, and Wilde's scandalous suggestion that love might outrank the soul in that contest. Alongside it sit temptation, structured as the classic triple offer of wisdom, wealth and pleasure, and the danger of any part of a person exiled from the heart: the soul is not evil by nature, it is evil because it was sent into the world unloved. The ending adds redemption through beauty, when flowers from the sinners' grave convert the priest's own sermon.
A sharper reading: the story is less anti religion than anti division. Every disaster follows an act of separation, soul from body, sea folk from church, heart from soul, and the only healing moments are unions: the soul entering the broken heart, the priest blessing what he had cursed. Wilde, writing in 1891, was building a theology in which nothing loved can be wholly lost, and he hid it inside a mermaid story.
The craft: literalising the metaphor
The story's engine is a single audacious move: treating the soul as a character who can be cut loose, walk to the East, and come home changed. Once Wilde commits to that literalisation, the psychology writes itself as plot. Abstract statements like 'desire without conscience corrupts' become scenes: a heartless soul urging a hand toward a sleeping merchant. The annual return structure gives the middle of a long tale a firm rhythm, three temptations, each refused or fatally accepted, and the once only knife rule supplies real stakes at the exact moment the reader might relax.
The technique worth stealing is that literalised metaphor plus a hard rule. Pick the divided thing inside your character, name it, embody it, and then impose one unbreakable constraint on how it can be reunited. Writers preparing longer contest pieces can also study Wilde's pacing here: the travel tales the soul tells are gorgeous, but every one of them is secretly an argument aimed at the fisherman, so the ornament never stops being plot.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, learn the three temptations in order, wisdom, riches, then the dancing girl, and note that only the appeal to the body succeeds.
- Explain why the soul becomes evil: it was sent into the world without a heart, which is Wilde's thesis in one image.
- Use the priest's final sermon and the flowers on the altar as evidence for the redemption reading of the ending.
- Writers: literalise one inner conflict as a physical character or object and give it a strict rule that cannot be broken twice.
- Track the once only knife as a model of raising stakes by removing a second chance.
- Compare the mermaid's element to the dancing girl's feet to show how precisely Wilde matches temptation to lack.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character surgically removes one part of themselves, their ambition, their fear, their memory of a person, and that removed part goes out into the world alone and comes back a year later, changed, asking to be let in.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Fisherman and His Soul?
The mermaid's dead body washes ashore, and the fisherman kisses her as the sea rises and drowns him. His heart breaks, and through the broken heart his exiled soul finally reunites with him. Flowers from their unmarked grave later cover the altar, and the priest preaches of love and blesses the sea he once cursed.
Why does the soul become evil in the story?
When the fisherman cuts his soul away, he refuses to send his heart with it. Wandering the world heartless, the soul learns cruelty and returns each year to tempt him. Wilde's point is that no part of a person can stay good in exile from love.
What are the three temptations the soul offers?
In three successive years the soul offers the mirror of wisdom, a ring that brings riches, and finally the tale of a dancing girl nearby. The fisherman refuses wisdom and wealth because love is better, but the third temptation, aimed at the body, draws him ashore and traps him.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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