Hither's a question for you: which nifty work did Oscar Wilde write while imprisoned in Reading Gaol? Not The Carol of Reading Gaol – that was written while he was in exile in France post-obit his release from prison – but De Profundis, his long letter to his old lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) sees Wilde reflecting on the nature of sin, offense, beloved, and hatred in a long poem that has given us a number of famous lines, 'Each man kills the thing he loves' being the most memorable. You can read The Carol of Reading Gaol here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of the poem below.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol : summary

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a long poem of 109 half-dozen-line stanzas: 654 lines in all. Wilde defended the poem to a fellow prisoner, Charles Thomas Woolridge ('C. T. W.'), a soldier who had been convicted for murdering his married woman and who was hanged in Reading Gaol in July 1896 – the get-go execution that had taken identify at the prison for 18 years. Woolridge is the 'He' of the poem's opening stanzas, and too the inspiration for the recurring refrain: 'Each human being kills the thing he loves.' Although Wilde never met Woolridge, he had observed him in the prison m on several occasions.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published in February 1898 not under Wilde's proper noun but rather his prison number, 'C.3.3.' His identity was only established the following July. Although Reading was the most famous prison Wilde was sent to, he was not imprisoned at that place immediately: offset of all, in March 1895, he was at Newgate, then at Pentonville, before beingness moved to Wandsworth, and then finally, in November 1895, to Reading.

And the poem is, in summary, a meditation on his feel of the British penal system, and the very idea of capital punishment (embodied, in the poem, by the hanging of Woolridge). The poem begins by describing Woolridge:

He did non wear his ruddy coat,
For claret and vino are red,
And blood and vino were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

At that place are several factual errors in this stanza pertaining to Woolridge: as a member of the Royal Horse Guards, he did non wear the usual cerise glaze worn by British soldiers, only a blueish coat; and he didn't murder his wife in her bed but in the street. But Wilde is clearly adapting the real-life events of Woolridge's downfall for artistic purposes, and the idea of a man killing his married woman in a bed which they had formerly shared for lovemaking neatly summarises the mortiferous relationship between destructive hate and romantic honey which the poem explores.

News of Woolridge's fate – that he has 'got to swing', i.e. be hanged – spread throughout the gaol, leading Wilde to reflect upon what the human must be feeling:

I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his stride, and why
He looked upon the garish solar day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And then he had to dice.

Wilde then contrasts the condemned homo'south fate with that of the other prisoners, including himself: they, also, take 'killed the matter they beloved', in 1 fashion or another, but they have not been sentenced to die:

He does non wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny blackness,
With the yellow face of Doom.

In the second part of the verse form, Wilde homes in on Woolridge once again, noting the condemned guardsman's behaviour:

He did not wring his hands nor cry,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air equally though information technology held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been vino!

Indeed, Woolridge has a pace which is 'low-cal and gay': behaviour which seems at odds with the man'southward imminent fate. As with so many aspects of The Ballad of Reading Gaol – the idea of killing what you dear being the nearly obvious – we are presented with a paradox, that intellectual puzzle which Wilde had fabricated one of the hallmarks of his wit when he was the toast of British social club. Now, the paradoxes have become darker and more sombre, but they withal encase an apparent contradiction.

For strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And foreign it was to encounter him look
So wistfully at the mean solar day,
And strange information technology was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.

It was reported that Woolridge had turned himself in immediately after he had murdered his estranged married woman in the street; he appear that he would accept turned the weapon (a razor) on himself if it had not fallen from his manus. So he seemed resigned to his own expiry. This explains his apparent acceptance of the sentence.

So with curious eyes and ill surmise
We watched him solar day by day,
And wondered if each ane of united states
Would end the self-aforementioned way,
For none tin tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

This is ambiguous: 'end[ing] the self-aforementioned way', does Wilde mean untimely death (eastward.yard. by one's own hand) or execution for murder? The phrase 'red Hell', suggesting the ruby-red mist of murderous anger, implies the latter: fifty-fifty the mildest and most placid human may be driven to murder, Wilde seems to imply, past his passions. At that place is a sense of sympathy and kinship with the condemned guardsman here, a sense of 'in that location but for the grace of God go I'. The murderer is not othered by Wilde: instead, the poet recognises that such impulses lurk within every man, and it is wrong for u.s.a. to condemn all killers as mere psychopaths or deviants. Woolridge was non mad, paranoid, or evil, Wilde seems to feel: he was a jealous husband who did a terrible thing in the heat of his passions. This doesn't allow him off his horrible crime, of course, merely is not the same as dismissing him every bit an inhuman monster: a fine but of import distinction.

In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is loftier,
Then it was at that place he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And past each side a Warder walked,
For fear the human might dice.

Some other paradox, and one whose grim irony Wilde must have appreciated: warders walk alongside the condemned man at all times, 'for fear the man might die' before he is executed. Not because they want him to alive, simply because they desire to make certain he his executed in the proper way, by the State. If the prisoner cruel or contrived to take his ain life, the Country would be robbed of its retribution and penalisation:

Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.

Wilde and then goes on to detail some of the harsh tasks he and his beau prisoners were told to acquit out:

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

Decease is never far backside: each prisoner'south cell is 'his numbered tomb' (Wilde'due south was C.three.3., of course). They are dead men walking, corpses that live and breathe: another paradox. And the night before Woolridge is to hang, things have a Gothic plough:

That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fearfulness,
And up and down the atomic number 26 town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer.

The extent to which The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a Gothic poem is open to argue, just this section of the poem is preoccupied with night terrors, 'phantoms', and notions of haunting. There is too a religious element to it: a sort of dark night of the soul, where once again, each prisoner who is not to hang in the morning, including Wilde, imagines how it must feel to be the man who is to die the next morning.

The rest of the poem outlines the execution of Woolridge and its aftermath, and expands on the poem's key themes mentioned higher up.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol : assay

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's most famous poem. He had begun his career as a poet, winning the prestigious Newdigate Prize while he was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1870s for his verse form 'Ravenna'. His earliest published works were poems and poetry collections. (We take selected some of his finest poems here.) But as his career took off and Wilde became, in a sense, the start modern celebrity – known as much for who he was as for what he wrote – he devoted his time to fiction and plays and to … well, to being Oscar Wilde. Information technology was only after his confidence for 'gross indecency' in 1895 and his being sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison, and then his subsequent release in 1897, that Wilde returned to poetry, because this the ideal grade to reflect his prison house experience.

The oft-quoted refrain from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 'each human being kills the thing he loves', is not but nigh Charles Thomas Woolridge, of class. It is besides a reflection of Wilde's own downfall and his tempestuous human relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas ('Bosie') and his even more disastrous run-in with Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, whose allegation of Wilde as a 'somdomite' (sic) led Wilde to accept the Marquis to court. Afterward, Wilde himself was charged with 'gross indecency' for his relations with other men, and it was this that led to the well-known court instance in 1895.

Indeed, the idea that Wilde was reflecting upon his own life as he was portraying Woolridge'due south seems clear from one of the most famous stanzas in The Carol of Reading Gaol:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a osculation,
The brave man with a sword!

The coward kills the thing he loves with a kiss (recalling Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, who identified Jesus to the Roman regime by kissing him), much as Wilde'south own relationship with Bosie had been the kiss of decease.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is written in 6-line stanzas: strictly speaking, it is non a conventional ballad (we have collected some of the finest traditional ballads in a divide post), but an adaptation of the four-line ballad class, which is rhymed abcb (Wilde adds an extra couple of lines to his stanza, rhymed db). The metre of the poem is alternate lines of tetrameter and trimeter, equally nosotros detect in a traditional ballad:

I NEV- / er SAW / a MAN / who LOOKED
With SUCH / a WIST- / ful EYE
Up-ON / that LIT- / tle TENT / of BLUE
Which PRIS- / 'ners Call / the Sky,
And 't EV- / 'ry Migrate- / ing CLOUD / that WENT
With SAILS / of SIL- / ver BY.

The apostrophes in lines four and five show where a syllable has been elided – then, for instance, 'prisoners' is pronounced as ii syllables ('pris'ners') rather than three ('pris-o-ners').

Nigh Oscar Wilde

The life of the Irish gaelic novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is every bit famous equally – perhaps even more famous than – his piece of work. But in a career spanning some twenty years, Wilde created a body of work which continues to be read an enjoyed by people effectually the world: a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; brusque stories and fairy tales such as 'The Happy Prince' and 'The Selfish Giant'; poems including The Carol of Reading Gaol; and essay-dialogues which were witty revivals of the Platonic philosophical dialogue.

But above all, it is Wilde'due south plays that he continues to be known for, and these include witty cartoon-room comedies such as Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Beingness Hostage, likewise as a Biblical drama, Salome (which was banned from performance in the UK and had to be staged abroad). Wilde is also oftentimes remembered for his witty quips and paradoxes and his conversational one-liners, which are legion. They include, 'Piece of work is the curse of the drinking classes', and 'I have nothing to declare except my genius' (when travelling through customs in America).

Wilde's life – his generosity to others, his double life as a family human and someone who engaged with extramarital affairs with other men, and his subsequent downfall when he was put on trial for 'gross indecency' – has been movingly written about in Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde and in the 1997 biopic Wilde, with Stephen Fry in the title part.