The ballad of Reading Gaol
Oscar Wilde
Brief Biography
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) first rose to prominence at Oxford University,
where he founded the Aesthetic Movement which promoted ‘art
for art’s sake’ and was notorious for his colourful style of dress. His
major successes were on the London stage, with a number of highly
accomplished, witty plays which undermined social conventions,
culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest.
His life ended bitterly. He was convicted for homosexual practices and
sentenced to imprisonment. After his release, he lived his last years
in Paris under a pseudonym. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written
at this time.
The finished poem was published in 1898 under the name C.3.3.,
which stood for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. This ensured that
Wilde's name – by then notorious – did not appear on the poem's
front cover. It was not commonly known, until June 1899, that
C.3.3. was actually Wilde.
The ballad of Reading Gaol
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that
went
With sails of silver by.
Dear Christ! the very prison
walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head
became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I walked, with other souls in
pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man
had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me
whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing."
I only knew what hunted
thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he
loved
And so he had to die.
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
kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they
are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands
of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife,
because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too
long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many
tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he
loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of
shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his
neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through
the floor,
Into an empty place
Summary
This excerpt comprises of the first ten stanzas of
Wilde’s much longer poem ‘The Ballad of
Reading Gaol’ (gaol is pronounced ‘jail’). He
was inspired to write the poem by the
execution of a fellow inmate for the brutal
murder of his wife. However, the poem also is
an attack on the injustice and hypocrisy of
Victorian Society. It also has a political
undercurrent, appealing for prison reform.
Summary cont’d
The excerpt concentrates on the condemned man
(Charles Thomas Wooldridge), whom the persona
(the voice speaking in the poem) never meets but
observes during exercise period, eyeing the sky
wistfully. Wilde quickly shifts to presenting the
impact on the persona, who reacts to the news
that the convict is to be executed. He then
meditates on the wider implications of guilt:
“each man” is guilty of a crime—killing the thing
he loves—but is not held accountable. The
persona then resumes his account of the plight of
the condemned man, execution.
Questions on structure and language
1.
2.
What rhythm does Wilde use in this poem?
Find examples of internal rhyme in the poem? What might these rhymes
represent?
3. The rhythm, rhyme and simple vocabulary or stanza 8 create an almost
nursery rhyme effect? Why does Wilde do this?
4. One stanza contains lots of different examples of alliteration. Which one is it
and why does Wilde do this here?
5. Two consecutive stanzas contains a number of examples of imagery. Why are
they used at this particular point?
6. What is the purpose of the exclamation in stanza 5?
7. Stanzas 7, 8 and 9 use a great deal of antitheses (opposites). Why does Wilde
do this?
8. Where and why does Wilde use repetition in this extract?
9. There is a great deal of negative diction in stanza ten. What is the effect of
this?
10. Why do you think Wilde describes the execution in such detail in stanza ten?
Structure
Although the poem is labelled a “ballad,” Wilde
did not adhere to the traditional, four-line
ballad stanza (with the second and fourth lines
rhyming) but adopted a six-line stanza instead.
Wilde also used iambic tetrameter (four
repetitions of the iambic pattern of stress on
the second syllable) rather than the five
repetitions popular in English poetry (iambic
pentameter). Internal rhyme is also frequently
used.
Language
The poem begins with a lot of emotive language,
‘poor dead woman’ and ‘murdered’ which
sets a rather melodramatic tone and
establishes the persona’s voice. The second
stanza describes the dead man as he walks
around the ‘trial yard’ at the prison. ‘His step
seemed light and gay,’ but the prisoner was
described as looking ‘wistfully’ at the day. This
contrast shows the prisoners’ dilemma, he is
under a death sentence.
Language
In the third stanza, the persona observes the condemned
man looking at the sky ‘A little tent of blue’ with and
the clouds passing ‘With sails of silver’. This imagery
sums up the beauty of the natural world and the
condemned man’s wish to remain alive. Which is
contrasted by society’s voice in stanza 4 proclaiming
‘That fellow's got to swing.’ This is perhaps Wilde’s
most poignant plea, for us to pause before we
condemn others, as Wilde was condemned for his
homosexuality. In stanza 5, Wilde uses a simile to show
his sympathy with the condemned man,
‘The sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel’
Language
He goes on to say that everyone in some way is
responsible for destroying what they love ‘Each
man kills the thing he loves ’. He then lists the
variety of ways men and women hurt each other
‘Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.’
Although we may not all be murderers, we have all
hurt the people we love, just as the condemned
prisoner does, so Wilde is asking why was there
so little mercy for him in Victorian society?
Language
The final stanzas of the excerpt use antithesis to show the
myriad of ways that people hurt and abuse each other,
‘Some love too little, some too long/Some sell, and others
buy’. Before using negative diction and semantics to show
that the punishment we all deserve for our cruelty is given
to the condemned man ,
‘Nor have a noose about his neck/Nor a cloth upon his
face/
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor /
Into an empty place.’
This end to the excerpt places us squarely in the shoes of
the condemned we feel his terror as he hangs, an
emotional end to this section of the poem.
Crimes of humanity
• Look at the various crimes that Wilde lists in stanzas
7-9.
• These all detail ways that man kills the thing he
loves.
• In pairs select three of the ways Wilde gives and
think of examples of how this might kill someone.
Your examples can be traditional or modern e.g.
‘some strangle with the hands of lust’ – this could
apply to men who rape women and so something
dies inside or someone who kills another by giving
them an STI.
Jail Mime
• In groups of three you are going to produce a
mime for one of the stanzas of the poem.
• You will need someone to be the condemned
man and maybe another to be the persona of
the poem. The third will read the stanza as
the mime takes place. Try to include as many
details as possible.
• You will be numbered 1-10 and must then find
your other group members.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/23/oscar-wilde-ballad-reading-gaol-poem
Wilde wrote the poem in 1898. He was now free, but a broken man, and a broke one. Besides
two letters, he produced nothing else of literary significance before his death. It was first
published simply under his prisoner identification number, C.3-3.
The poem is dedicated to the memory of the "sometime" Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles
Thomas Wooldridge, and the central incident is Wooldridge's execution for the murder of his
wife. Around this narrative core, whose genre might be described as gothic realism, Wilde builds
a meditation on the paradoxes of morality. The Ballad is an indictment of the death penalty and
the whole penal system, but it is much more than a protest poem. It is a revelation, and its
structure is part of that revelation.
Everyone can quote the refrain: "For each man kills the thing he loves." Poetically, it's
unquestionably powerful, and, intellectually, it's powerfully questionable. What does Wilde
mean? Perhaps he is saying that love itself corrupts or alters its object. That would certainly
seem to have been true of his relationship with "Bosie", Lord Alfred Douglas, seemingly a
spoiled brat further spoiled by Wilde's adulation. Judas, of course, is on his mind: the poem
refers to the kiss of Caiaphas, the latter being the priest who participated in Christ's betrayal.
Wilde loved paradox, and he found some essential symbol of it in the man who murdered his
wife. Perhaps he found another in the hypocrisy of the prison system itself, destroying the souls
and bodies of those it would reform. The ballad form, as he adapts it, encases paradox and story
in a tight, encircling ring. It is both a Dante-esque circle of hell and the deadly routine of prison
life. It represents the whole cycle of crime and punishment. It is inescapable, like the "iron gin"
mentioned in line 173, a symbol of confinement and possibly also an actual machine.
In the plodding iambic tetrameter and the extensive use of refrain and parallelism, we can feel
at a physical level the grinding relentlessness of prison work. The tasks Victorian prisoners were
set were part of their punishment. They would pedal a treadmill with their feet, for example,
and though some prison treadmills were geared to grind corn or raise water, others had no use
but to enslave. Then there was the nasty business of oakum picking, a task of unravelling the
twine of old tarred ropes salvaged from ships. Wilde had worked at this until his fingers bled.