the ballad of reading gaol essay

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

By Oscar Wilde

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is a scathing critique of the penal system and an exploration of complex human emotions.

Oscar Wilde

Nationality: Irish

He also wrote many other works, mostly plays, which were crafted to challenge and entertain.

Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' probes the themes of justice, punishment, retribution, and societal hypocrisy, providing historical insights into the dehumanizing penal system of 19th-century Victorian England.

Poem Analyzed by Emma Baldwin

B.A. English (Minor: Creative Writing), B.F.A. Fine Art, B.A. Art Histories

This poem is Oscar Wilde’s most successful poem and was his last great work written before his death in 1900. ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol ‘ details the emotional experience of imprisonment, something that Wilde lived firsthand when he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol after a failed court case with his long-term partner’s father. While imprisoned, Wilde wrote another work that’s now closely associated with the last years of his life, De Profundis.  Wilde died shortly after being released from Reading Gaol.

Explore The Ballad of Reading Gaol

• 4 Structure and Form
• 5 Literary Devices
• 6 Analysis of The Ballad of Reading Gaol
• 7 About Oscar Wilde
• 8 Similar Poems

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ by Oscar Wilde tells of Wilde’s experiences in prison and his observations of another prisoner condemned to die.

The poem begins with the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who murdered his wife. The man has been sentenced to hang and goes about his life in prison wistfully. Wilde and the other men are jealous of his attitude as he has accepted his fate and is the better for it. In the second section, Wooldridge is hanged. He meets his death bravely while the other men cower from even the idea. Wilde spends time describing how the monotony of jail is only broken by the terror of it.  

In the third section, Wilde describes the daily activities of the prisoners and the way they spend their nights. They are haunted by phantoms that seem to be very much alive.   The rest of the poem describes the funeral of Wooldridge and how his body was covered in lime. It also speaks on Wilde’s general ideas about the justice system and that one must come to God to find happiness.   The poem concludes with Wilde restating his original refrain regarding the fact that all men “kill the thing they love,” in one way or another.  

In  ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’  Wilde engages with themes of loss, imprisonment, and emotional turbulence. The poet works from his own experiences in Reading Gaol, and those of men he met or knew about, to craft this poem about the sorrows of life, love, and solitude. Wilde was separate from everything and everyone he loved during this dark period of his life and those emotions come through in the text. He focuses, through repetition , on how men inevitably destroy that which they love.

The poem begins with a discussion of Charles Thomas Wooldridge who was condemned to die in 1896 for murdering his wife in a jealous rage. During an argument, they tumbled onto the street, and he slit her throat with a knife. After the murder, he begged the officers to arrest him and mourned his action until his death.

Structure and Form

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ by Oscar Wilde is a 109-stanza poem separated into six sections. The sections all maintain the same rhyme scheme of ABCBDB. The poem feels quite consistent and regular due to this fact, as well as the numerous instances of repetition that Wilde makes use of.

Literary Devices

Wilde makes use of several literary devices in  ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’  These include but are not limited to alliteration , enjambment , and repetition. The latter is one of the most important in the poem. It can be seen in Wilde’s broad repetition of lines like “For each man kills the thing he loves.” A number of the stanzas in this poem are identical or close to identical due to this literary device. It helps the poem maintain its sing-song-like feeling.

Enjambment is a common literary device used by poets when they cut off a line before its natural stopping point. For example, the transition between lines one and two of the second stanza of part I and lines one and two of stanza three in part III.

Alliteration is another type of repetition. One that’s concerned with the use and reuse of the same consonant sounds at the beginning of words. For example, “hands” and “him” in lines three and four of the first stanza of part I.

Analysis of The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Stanza one  .

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.

Before beginning this poem it is important to consider the place from which the poet is writing. Wilde is the speaker in this piece but the actions described in the poem are not his own. They belong to Charles Thomas Wooldridge .

The first lines of the piece take the reader directly to the scene of the murder. Wilde describes the moment directly after Wooldridge was found with his wife. The man did not “wear his scarlet coat,” at that time because “blood and wine are red.” Wilde is describing the fact that Wooldridge took off his Royal Horse Guards uniform before committing this crime.  

In this first line, there is a simple mistake that Wilde was well aware of. In an effort to maintain the rhyme scheme of the piece, he was forced to refer to the coat as red, rather than its actual color, blue.  

When they found Wooldridge with his wife there was “blood and wine” on his hands. The man and his wife were found in the street outside their home, but once more Wilde changes a detail to suit the poem. He places Laura in her “bed.” It is clear that Wilde pities this woman but also feels some degree of empathy for the murderer himself, likely due to all that will follow.

Stanza Two  

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.

Although Wilde was in Reading Gaol at the same time as Wooldridge he was not there to witness the trial. He imagines the setting in which the deliberations took place, and casts Wooldridge there in his “suit of shabby grey.” He describes the man as appearing   “wistful,” and walking with a “light and gay” step. Although he has been sentenced to die, Wooldridge is not bothered by it. It is known from historical records that Wooldridge deeply regretted his attack on his wife and was satisfied to spend his remaining days, until his execution, in prison.  

Stanza Three  

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.

Once more, and not for the last time, Wilde emphasizes the “wistful” way in which Wooldridge carries himself. It is likely that Wilde was jealous of the man’s inner peace and acceptance of his dire situation.  

From his own place in the prison, Wilde is able to see Wooldridge as he moves through his daily routine. He observes him looking up at the “little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky.” These lines are relevant to both Wilde and Wooldridge. Wilde is able to describe these moments so poignantly because he was there to experience them too.   He knows the importance of a simple fleeting beauty of a cloud.  

Stanza Four  

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.”

For the first time, Wilde refers to himself as “I.” Here he is, “with the other souls” as they walk in a “ring” around a prison courtyard. This is the manner of exercise that they are allowed to take. While walking the men whisper to one another and Wilde meditates on what Wooldridge, and the other inmates, have done.  

He does not know whether “the man,” presumably Wooldridge had done a “great or little thing.” He gets a clue from an inmate behind him who says in a low whisper, “‘That fellow’s got to swing’.” He knows now that the man in question is on death row, waiting to be executed.  

Stanza Five  

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.

This revelation, about the pain Wooldridge must be in, causes the narrator to “reel.” It sends his head spinning and it is as if the “walls” are moving. The sky that hangs above Wilde’s head became “Like a casque of scorching steel.” Casque refers to the metal helmet of a knight’s costume. It is as if the world has compressed itself around the speaker and he is trapped in an even greater nightmare.  

All he can feel is the pain that Wooldridge must be experiencing, his own problems and future slip to the side.  

Stanza Six  

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.

The only thoughts he knows are those of Wooldridge. Wilde is able to, through their shared experiences in Reading Gaol, understand a good portion of what he is going through. Wilde comprehends the fact that this man is “wistful” because he knows he deserves to die. He had “killed the thing he loved / And so he had to die.” Wooldridge has accepted his fate and finds peace there.  

Stanza Seven

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!

In what is going to be a refrain, Wilde expands his comprehension of Wooldridge’s situation, and relates it to all men. All men, “each man,” destroys what he loves most in one way or another. Some of these men ruin relationships and possibilities “with a bitter look,” and others, through a misplaced “flattering word.” There is a portion of the male population that, in their fear, betray the ones they love and never own up to it, others, like Wooldridge are “brave” in their choices.  

While Wilde is not condoning what Wooldridge did, he sees it as being “braver” than slinking away, taking no responsibility.  

Stanza Eight  

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.

Wilde expands this thought in the next two stanzas making a number of different categories for the ways in which men ruin their lives or drive off the ones they love. Some do it when they are “young,” some when they are “old.” There are the men who are driven by “Lust,” and others by “the hands of Gold.”  

Stanza Nine  

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.

There are men in the world who find folly in other ways. Some are liable to “love too little, some too long.” There are the men that “sell” out their love, and others who can only “buy” it. There are men who “do the deed,” (killing the thing they love), with tears in their eyes and others who are able to do it “without a sigh.”  

He concludes this stanza by stating that while all men are going to kill “the thing [they] love,” not all will die for it as Wooldridge will.  

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

In the final half of this first section, the poet turns to speak about a metaphorical man that does not own up to the “killing” of the thing he loves. This man is one of the cowards. He does not experience the things that Wilde and Wooldridge are forced to.  

This man will never have to die a “death of shame” with a “noose about his neck.” His life will not end “Into an empty place” as Wooldridge’s will. This, in many ways, places Wooldridge, a murderer, above other men.  

Stanza Eleven  

He does not sit with silent men Who watch him night and day; Who watch him when he tries to weep, And when he tries to pray; Who watch him lest himself should rob The prison of its prey.

Additionally, this unnamed man who did not admit to “killing” the thing he loved does “not sit with silent men / Who watch him night and day.” As Wilde and Wooldridge are constantly, this man is not being observed at all times. Men in prison have no privacy. There are people there to watch while one “tries to weep [or] pray.” They are there to make sure that one does not kill himself before his day of execution. The prison officials do not, as Wilde says, want to “rob / The prison of its prey.”  

Stanza Twelve  

He does not 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 black,   With the yellow face of Doom.

This man does not wake up in a cold sell at “dawn” to see the “Dread figures” of the prison around his room. He does not have to see the Chaplain, or the “Governor all in shiny black” on the day of his execution.  

Stanza Thirteen  

He does not rise in piteous haste   To put on convict-clothes, While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes   Each new and nerve-twitched pose, Fingering a watch whose little ticks   Are like horrible hammer-blows.

On the morning of his execution, the man in the story is forced to rise in “piteous haste” and redress in his “convict-clothes.” There is a doctor outside the cell who is there to note everything the man does, even on his way to death. Each “new and nerve-twitched pose” is written down. The man who “does not die” will never see or feel these things. In this way, he is blessed, but he is also among the group of men that Wilde considers cowardly.  

Stanza Fourteen  

He does not know that sickening thirst   That sands one’s throat, before The hangman with his gardener’s gloves   Slips through the padded door, And binds one with three leathern thongs,   That the throat may thirst no more.

In this short story that Wilde has weaved into the ballad, the man who does not own up to his deeds will never know the “sickening thirst” in one’s throat as the “Hangman” enters into the room. This man will not ever experience the binding of his hands with “three leathern thongs.”   Soon, the man who is being executed will “thirst no more.”

Stanza Fifteen  

He does not bend his head to hear   The Burial Office read, Nor, while the terror of his soul   Tells him he is not dead, Cross his own coffin, as he moves   Into the hideous shed.

Bound and listening to the men around him, the prisoner, who will never be the cowardly man, hears the “Burial Office read” his edict of death. He will never be condemned as this man is, or have to be reminded by the “terror of his soul” that he is not dead, but is about to be. The man will never be forced to pass by “his own coffin” as he makes his way to the “shed” where he will be executed.  

Stanza Sixteen  

He does not stare upon the air   Through a little roof of glass; He does not pray with lips of clay   For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek   The kiss of Caiaphas.

Finally, Wilde concludes this short narrative very chillingly. The man who is there to die will have to pass by his own coffin and enter into the “hideous shed” where he will be executed. This is a sight the cowardly man will never see. His lips will never feel as if they are made “of clay” as he prays and begs “For his agony to pass.”   The last thing this man will not have to feel are the lips of “Caiaphas,” the priest in the Bible who organized the execution of Jesus Christ, pressed against his “shuddering cheek.”

  Death will not come to this cowardly man in this manner, but it will come to Wooldridge this way.  

Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard, In a suit of shabby grey: His 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.

In the six weeks that Wilde observed Wooldridge, the “guardsman” walking in “the yard,” or the outdoor portion of the prison, he was always dressed in the “suit of shabby grey” worn by all prisoners. During this time the man always walked with a “step [that] seemed light and gay.” He looked, as he always does, “wistfully at the day.”  

The consistent and unwavering rhyme scheme of this poem is one of its greatest and most powerful assets. It unifies this long ballad in a way that many poems reach for, but cannot achieve.  

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 wandering cloud that trailed Its raveled fleeces by.

Wilde repeats the same lines concerning Wooldridge’s wistfulness and his gaze upon the sky. He says that he watched the “clouds” that moved through the sky like “raveled fleeces.”  

He did not wring his hands, as do   Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope   In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun,   And drank the morning air.

Wooldridge is different from the other men in a number of notable ways. His wistfulness keeps him from wringing “his hands” like all the other men do. The other men still have some measure of hope in their hearts, but Wooldridge does not. He “only looked upon the sun” and drank in the “morning air.”  

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

Additionally, Wooldridge does not “weep…or pine” as others do. He takes in the air like “Some healthful anodyne.” It is like medicine or wine to him, driving him forward, peacefully to his death. The sun rejuvenates and soothes him.  

And I and all the souls in pain,   Who tramped the other ring, Forgot if we ourselves had done   A great or little thing, And watched with gaze of dull amaze   The man who had to swing.

Wilde once more turns the narration on himself. He, and “all the souls in pain” that are walking in the circle of the prison, forget themselves when they see Wooldridge. All they can think of is their own amazement over Wooldridge’s peace of mind. They are envious of his wistful nature.  

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

The man stood out to the other prisoners. His “light” step and the way he looked at the day were “strange.” This was especially the case when one considers the “debt” that he had to “pay.”  

For oak and elm have pleasant leaves   That in the spring-time shoot: But grim to see is the gallows-tree,   With its adder-bitten root, And, green or dry, a man must die   Before it bears its fruit!

In this stanza, Wilde compares two different types of trees. Those that are allowed to grow and flourish, and those like the “gallows-tree” for which there is one purpose only. Its participation in death ruins its beauty. Men “must die” on its branches.  

The loftiest place is that seat of grace   For which all worldlings try: But who would stand in hempen band   Upon a scaffold high, And through a murderer’s collar take   His last look at the sky?

Wilde understands that all men long for “that seat of grace” in heaven, but none would choose to swap places with Wooldridge. They are not so anxious to meet God that they want to take their last look at the world “through a murderer’s collar.”  

It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

In conclusion to this thought, the speaker makes another comparison . This time between dancing to “violins” and the dancing that one’s feet to “upon the air” after they are hanged. These are two very different things that appear the same.  

Stanza Ten  

So with curious eyes and sick surmise   We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us   Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell   His sightless soul may stray.

The men are very “curious” about Wooldridge and wonder if when it is their turn to die they will “end the self-same way.” They also question Wooldridge’s interior life. They do not know if there are times that his mind strays to a “red Hell.” Perhaps he is not as peaceful as they think.  

At last the dead man walked no more   Amongst the Trial Men, And I knew that he was standing up   In the black dock’s dreadful pen, And that never would I see his face   In God’s sweet world again.

Finally comes the day that the men go outside and Wooldridge is no longer among them. Wilde knows that that day “he was standing up,” ready to be hanged. They knew that they would never “see his face   / In God’s sweet world again.”  

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm   We had crossed each other’s way: But we made no sign, we said no word,   We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night,   But in the shameful day.

Wilde compares their almost meeting during their time in prison to the passing of “two doomed ships” in a storm. They had not spoken to one another or actually met in any time but the “shameful day.”

A prison wall was round us both,   Two outcast men were we: The world had thrust us from its heart,   And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin   Had caught us in its snare.

They were stuck in the same prison, with the same walls surrounding them. They were both “outcast men” that the world had thrust from “its heart.” Wilde feels an intimate connection to this doomed man and although Wilde’s fate would be different, he knew his path to be dark. They were both caught up in “Sin.”  

Section III

In Debtors’ Yard the stones are hard,   And the dripping wall is high, So it was there he took the air   Beneath the leaden sky, And by each side a Warder walked,   For fear the man might die.

While Wooldridge may have reached his end in the previous section, Wilde’s narration of prison life is not complete. It is important to note that many of things he will mention can relate to both Wooldridge and himself.  

Wilde takes the time to describe the “Debtors’ Yard” in which there a wall that is consistently “dripping” with water. It was “there” that the man, Wooldridge, or even Wilde himself, “took the air” underneath the dark sky. All the time, no matter where he went, Wooldridge has a “Warder” by his side. Just in case some accident befell him, or he was able to commit suicide.  

Or else he sat with those who watched   His anguish night and day; Who watched him when he rose to weep,   And when he crouched to pray; Who watched him lest himself should rob   Their scaffold of its prey.

At other times of the day he “sat with those who watched” him day in and day out. These people, the warders of the prison, and the other prisoners, saw him “when he rose to weep / And when he crouched to pray.” They were determined to keep him from killing himself.

Stanza Three

The Governor was strong upon   The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but   A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called   And left a little tract.

Wilde describes those that watch “The man” They are the “governor” of the prison who strictly enforced the “Regulations Act .” A law that was meant to limit the amount of religious expression in public. There is also the “Doctor” who felt no emotion about death and only regarded it as a “scientific fact.” The Chaplain was there also who “called” on Wooldridge “twice a day.”  

And twice a day he smoked his pipe,   And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held   No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad   The hangman’s hands were near.

During the two meals that the men had a day, Wooldridge drank his “beer” and “smoked his pipe.” He was “resolute” in his peace and it seemed as if there was no “fear” left in him. He claimed to be glad that his death was “near.”

But why he said so strange a thing   No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher’s doom   Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips,   And make his face a mask.

No one felt like they could ask why he was anxious for his death to come. The “Warders” did not “dare” to ask him. Especially because they are not meant to speak to the prisoners.  

Or else he might be moved, and try   To comfort or console: And what should Human Pity do   Pent up in Murderers’ Hole? What word of grace in such a place   Could help a brother’s soul?

It might tempt the warders to do something kind and comfort the murderers. Wilde is taken aback by this and asks what they could really say that would comfort the prisoners.  

With slouch and swing around the ring We trod the Fool’s Parade! We did not care: we knew we were The Devil’s Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead Make a merry masquerade.

Wilde returns to the exterior of the prison where the main action seems to take place. There, the men “trod the Fool’s Parade” around the yard. They knew that their procession around the yard was foolish and that they resembled “The Devil’s Own Brigade.”  

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.

Wilde moves on to describe the labor that the men were forced to undertake. Wilde was imprisoned with the requirement of “hard labor.” They cleaned the doors and floors until their “nails” were bleeding and each “plank” of the floor was clean and the only sound was the clattering of the “pails” of water.  

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.

They “sewed” up sacks and broke stones outside. They also sang and banged “tins” together as they “sweated on the mill.”  

All this action served as a brief distraction but “terror” was still at the “heart of every man.”

So still it lay that every day   Crawled like a weed-clogged wave: And we forgot the bitter lot   That waits for fool and knave, Till once, as we tramped in from work,   We passed an open grave.

The terror within them often laid so still that it could only crawl along like a “clogged wave.” They often forgot the terror was there until after their work was done. The men would be reminded as they “passed an open grave.”  

With yawning mouth the yellow hole   Gaped for a living thing; The very mud cried out for blood   To the thirsty asphalte ring: And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair   Some prisoner had to swing.

The “yawning mouth” of the hole seemed to “Gape” for any “living thing.” The earth was crying “out for blood.” They all knew, whenever they saw that, that some prisoner was going to be hanged.  

Right in we went, with soul intent   On Death and Dread and Doom: The hangman, with his little bag,   Went shuffling through the gloom And each man trembled as he crept   Into his numbered tomb.

As the men walked back into the prison they would be filled with “Death and Dread and Doom.” This would only intensify when they passed the hangman and then entered into their own cells for a lonely night.  

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

In the long nights, their dreams and thoughts were “full of forms of Fear.” They would lay away and try to listen to some sound in the corridor or hope for a glance of the stars through “the bars” of their cells.”  

He lay as one who lies and dreams In a pleasant meadow-land, The watcher watched him as he slept, And could not understand How one could sleep so sweet a sleep With a hangman close at hand?

Wooldridge though, was different. He slept like someone who is in a “pleasant meadow-land.” This was baffling to the warders who were made to watch him. They could not understand how he slept so well with death near.  

But there is no sleep when men must weep   Who never yet have wept: So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—   That endless vigil kept, And through each brain on hands of pain   Another’s terror crept.

On the other side of the spectrum are the men who are facing despair for the first time, like Wilde himself. They are unable to sleep and stay up all night keeping the “endless vigil.” Their minds are filled with “pain” and the terror spreads through the prison.  

Alas! it is a fearful thing   To feel another’s guilt! For, right within, the sword of Sin   Pierced to its poisoned hilt, And as molten lead were the tears we shed   For the blood we had not spilt.

They are able, through the walls of the prison, and the glances they see of one another, to take on the guilt of others. It is as if one has been stuck with the “sword of Sin.” Which has then allowed “molten lead” to spill from their eyes, all because deeds they had not committed.

Stanza Seventeen  

The Warders with their shoes of felt Crept by each padlocked door, And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe, Grey figures on the floor, And wondered why men knelt to pray Who never prayed before.

The “warders” wear “felt” shoes so that when they walk down the halls their footsteps are not audible. They are like ghosts in the night that check each door and “peep” in on the men who are often praying. Those who pray are more than likely among the group that have “never prayed before.”  

Stanza Eighteen  

All through the night we knelt and prayed,   Mad mourners of a corpse! The troubled plumes of midnight were   The plumes upon a hearse: And bitter wine upon a sponge   Was the savior of Remorse.

It is not a small group that spends the night praying, but many men. They are like the “mourners of a corpse” who are unable to pull themselves away. The night brings out their prays as if midnight were the trailing end of a “hearse.” It urges them forward towards death.

Stanza Nineteen  

The cock crew, the red cock crew,   But never came the day: And crooked shape of Terror crouched,   In the corners where we lay: And each evil sprite that walks by night   Before us seemed to play.

It seems like the day is never going to come and relieve the prisoners of their pain. Terror is always crouching waiting for them “where [they] lay.” It is as if all the evil is manifested itself in spirits and is dancing right in front of them.  

Stanza Twenty  

They glided past, they glided fast,   Like travelers through a mist: They mocked the moon in a rigadoon   Of delicate turn and twist, And with formal pace and loathsome grace   The phantoms kept their tryst.

These spirits of evil glide past their cells and “mock” the moon as a source of light. They seem to be without end and have a “loathsome grace” that the men are unable to avoid.  

Stanza Twenty-One  

With mop and mow, we saw them go,   Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout   They trod a saraband: And the damned grotesques made arabesques,   Like the wind upon the sand!

The phantoms eventually start to “mop” away, “hand in hand.” They do not vanish as the prisoners would hope, but spin and flip in the air, taunting and terrifying the men.

Stanza Twenty-Two  

With the pirouettes of marionettes,   They tripped on pointed tread: But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,   As their grisly masque they led, And loud they sang, and loud they sang,   For they sang to wake the dead.

The phantoms also sing out loud for the torment of the prisoners. They are holding a “grisly masque” and singing as if they want to “wake the dead.” This is truly a gruesome sight, contained within the prisoner’s heads, which they have no choice but to witness every night.  

Stanza Twenty-Three

“Oho!” they cried, “The world is wide,   But fettered limbs go lame! And once, or twice, to throw the dice   Is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin   In the secret House of Shame.”

The ghosts cry out and sing about how all men play with fate. It is like rolling a dice. Some men are even able, through their status, to make it like a game. Those who lose end up in prison, in the “secret House of Shame.”

Stanza Twenty-Four

No things of air these antics were That frolicked with such glee: To men whose lives were held in gyves, And whose feet might not go free, Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things, Most terrible to see.

While an outsider might dismisses these phantoms of “things of air,” they are much more. They hold in their hands the lives of the prisoners. The ghosts are real, they are “living things,” that are “Most terrible to see.”

Stanza Twenty-Five

Around, around, they waltzed and wound;   Some wheeled in smirking pairs: With the mincing step of demirep   Some sidled up the stairs: And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,   Each helped us at our prayers.

The ghosts will still not leave the prisoners alone. They “waltz” around the prison, some in pairs. They climb up and down the stairs and “sneer and leer.” This drives the prisoners deeper into their prayers.

Stanza Twenty-Six

The morning wind began to moan,   But still the night went on: Through its giant loom the web of gloom   Crept till each thread was spun: And, as we prayed, we grew afraid   Of the Justice of the Sun.

It seems for a moment that morning is coming, but it is not yet time. This night has gone on so long, and the men has been so entrenched in their ghostly dreams, that they are starting to be afraid of the sun. They know it will bring them a “Justice” they aren’t prepared for.

Stanza Twenty-Seven

The moaning wind went wandering round   The weeping prison-wall: Till like a wheel of turning-steel   We felt the minutes crawl: O moaning wind! what had we done   To have such a seneschal?

There is a wind that is “moaning” around the “weeping prison-wall.” It brings along with it the slow turning of the wheel of time. Wilde asks what is it the men had done to be controlled by such a “seneschal,” or judicial officer. He is referring to the governor, Time, that seems to control them.

Stanza Twenty-Eight

At last I saw the shadowed bars   Like a lattice wrought in lead, Move right across the whitewashed wall   That faced my three-plank bed, And I knew that somewhere in the world   God’s dreadful dawn was red.

Finally, after a long seemingly endless night, Wilde can see the shadows of the bars of his cell. This lets him know that the sun is beginning to rise and “Move…across the whitewashed wall.”

He knows, as do the other men, that “somewhere in the world / God’s dreadful dawn was red.” It is as if the men lost some of their number during the darkness.

Stanza Twenty-Nine

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,   At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing   The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath   Had entered in to kill.

By six o’clock in the morning, the men are up cleaning their cells, and by seven they are still. The prison is cold, their stillness, and the quiet of the building freezes them. It is as if “the Lord of Death” has entered in the prison with the desire to “kill.”

Stanza Thirty

He did not pass in purple pomp,   Nor ride a moon-white steed. Three yards of cord and a sliding board   Are all the gallows’ need: So with rope of shame the Herald came   To do the secret deed.

It is time now for the entry of death. He did not come to the prison, and to the men, dressed as royalty or riding a “white steed.” He does not need these embellishments. All he, and the gallows need, are “Three yards of cord and a sliding board.”

Stanza Thirty-One

We were as men who through a fen   Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer,   Or give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us,   And what was dead was Hope.

The morning may have come, but their spirits are not lifted. They “dare not to breathe a prayer” or truly show how unhappy they are. They all know that something has died. The darkness, spirits, and answerless prayers have killed “Hope” in each one of them.

Stanza Thirty-Two

For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,   And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong,   It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong,   The monstrous parricide!

The hope is pointless and “Man’s…justice” will go where it wants to. It does not just “ swerve ” to the side to avoid anyone.

It will take whoever it wants to. Whether they be “weak” or “strong.”

Stanza Thirty-Three

We waited for the stroke of eight:   Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate   That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose   For the best man and the worst.

The men are waiting for the clocks to strike eight. They are very much on edge and know of the importance of this time of day and have no control over what is happening. Fate will choose who is to face the noose. It could be the “best man” or the “worst.”

Stanza Thirty-Four

We had no other thing to do,   Save to wait for the sign to come: So, like things of stone in a valley lone,   Quiet we sat and dumb: But each man’s heart beat thick and quick   Like a madman on a drum!

Just as they have been waiting all night for the morning to come, they now wait for eight o’clock. The men all sit, like stones in the valley with their hearts beating “thick and quick.”

Stanza Thirty-Five

With sudden shock the prison-clock   Smote on the shivering air, And from all the gaol rose up a wail   Of impotent despair, Like the sound that frightened marshes hear   From a leper in his lair.

All of a sudden, the “prison-clock” breaks the silence. It is answered by a “wail” that rises up from the “gaol.” It is a sound of “impotent despair,” and of wants unmet.

Stanza Thirty-Six

And as one sees most fearful things   In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope   Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare   Strangled into a scream.

It is at this time of day that the noose has made it’s choice and the other men in the prison are forced to see the “fearful things” that accompany a hanging like the “hempen rope” that is hooked up over the “blackened beam.” They can hear the screams of the dying prisoner combined with the sound of the hanging.

Stanza Thirty-Seven

And all the woe that moved him so   That he gave that bitter cry, And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,   None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one   More deaths than one must die.

They know of the man’s “wild regrets and bloody sweats” and how it is these things that forced him to that “bitter cry.”

Wilde notes that there are none in or out of the prison who understand the anguish of the dying man as well as he. He sympathizes with the man and relates to his living of “more lives than one” and dying more deaths than one.”

There is no chapel on the day   On which they hang a man: The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,   Or his face is far too wan, Or there is that written in his eyes   Which none should look upon.

On the day in which the man is hanged there is no church service or blessing from the Chaplain. His face is too “wan” and his heart is tired. He seems to feel the darkness of these moments as well.

So they kept us close till nigh on noon,   And then they rang the bell, And the Warders with their jingling keys   Opened each listening cell, And down the iron stair we tramped,   Each from his separate Hell.

The prison officials know that the men feel the darkness as well and keep a close eye on them throughout the day. The warders come to open each individual cell and the men are able to leave. They go down the stairs, departing from their “separate Hells.”

Out into God’s sweet air we went,   But not in wonted way, For this man’s face was white with fear,   And that man’s face was grey, And I never saw sad men who looked   So wistfully at the day.

The men are able to leave the prison but not in the way they want to. They are exiting and see other men whose faces are “white with fear” but no men who look “wistfully at the day” as Wooldridge used to.

Stanza Four

I never saw sad men who looked   With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue   We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed   In happy freedom by.

Wilde would never see another “sad” man who was able to look upon the day with the same wistfulness that Wooldridge did. The men, including himself, are able to see the clouds and sky, but are not able to view them as impassively. To them, they symbolize the unreachable freedom.

Stanza Five

But there were those amongst us all   Who walked with downcast head, And knew that, had each got his due,   They should have died instead: He had but killed a thing that lived   Whilst they had killed the dead.

Amongst the men that walk outside are “those” that know that they should be executed as well. They all know that they have committed the same, or a similar crime. But they all have “killed a thing” that was already dead, the hope inside themselves, while Wooldridge had killed his wife. Wilde does find a difference between the two.

For he who sins a second time   Wakes a dead soul to pain, And draws it from its spotted shroud,   And makes it bleed again, And makes it bleed great gouts of blood   And makes it bleed in vain!

Wilde notes that any man who is able to “sin a second time” will take up a “dead soul to pain.” It will rouse a man from his perpetual nature. It is like opening a great wound that will not stop bleeding.

Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb   With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round   The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round,   And no man spoke a word.

Once more Wilde mocks the procession in which the men walk though the courtyard. They are like “apes” or “clowns” that walk on the “slippery asphalte yard.”   No one speaks, there is nothing to say.

Stanza Eight

Silently we went round and round,   And through each hollow mind The memory of dreadful things   Rushed like a dreadful wind, And Horror stalked before each man,   And terror crept behind.

The repetitive nature of the circle they are making focuses their thoughts on   the memory of “dreadful things.” It is as if “ Horror ” was before each man and “terror” is creeping right behind. There is no escape.

Stanza Nine

The Warders strutted up and down,   And kept their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span,   And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at   By the quicklime on their boots.

The warders are also there. They wear clean uniforms and make it their goal to “herd” the prisoners around. They appear to be upright officers but the men cannot help but notice the “quicklime on their boots.”

For where a grave had opened wide, There was no grave at all: Only a stretch of mud and sand By the hideous prison-wall, And a little heap of burning lime, That the man should have his pall.

The warders had been about the job of burying Wooldridge. They had a grave, that was “no grave at all.” It as only a bit of mud and sand next to the wall of the prison. There they threw in the body and covered it over with lime to help speed up decomposition and disguise any smell.

Stanza Eleven

For he has a pall, this wretched man,   Such as few men can claim: Deep down below a prison-yard,   Naked for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot,   Wrapt in a sheet of flame!

While this was not a great funeral, the “wretched man” does have his pall, or funeral cloth wrapped over his coffin. It is not of the usual variety though. Wilde describes it as being a “sheet of flame,” the lime is burning away his body. This, and his shame, are all that Wooldridge has left.

Stanza Twelve

And all the while the burning lime   Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night,   And the soft flesh by the day, It eats the flesh and bones by turns,   But it eats the heart alway.

For the rest of time, until the body is completely gone, the lime will eat the “flesh and bone away.” It will be consistent in its progression, never stopping, and always eating the “heart away.”

Stanza Thirteen

For three long years they will not sow   Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot   Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky   With unreproachful stare.

It will take three years for the spot of ground to take “root or seedling there.” It will be an “unblessed…sterile” spot that looks up at the sky “with unreproachful stare.” Even in death the “murderer” is without reproach.

Stanza Fourteen

They think a murderer’s heart would taint   Each simple seed they sow. It is not true! God’s kindly earth   Is kindlier than men know, And the red rose would but blow more red,   The white rose whiter blow.

The warders believe that if they were to plant anything there that it would be tainted by the “murderer’s heart.” But that is not true. The earth, that belongs to God, is “kindlier than men know.” If they were to plant flowers there the “red rose” would only be more red and the white rose, more white.

Stanza Fifteen

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!   Out of his heart a white! For who can say by what strange way,   Christ brings his will to light, Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore   Bloomed in the great Pope’s sight?

Wilde imagines the sight of the roses growing over this grave. He sees the red rose coming from Wooldridge’s mouth and a white rose coming from his heart. It is one of those “strange ways” that “Christ brings his will to light.”

Stanza Sixteen

But neither milk-white rose nor red   May bloom in prison air; The shard, the pebble, and the flint,   Are what they give us there: For flowers have been known to heal   A common man’s despair.

The warders of the prison would never let this happen though. They only give the prisoners “shard, the pebble and the flint.” Nothing of beauty is allowed to exist such as the “flowers [which] have been known to heal / A common man’s despair.”

Stanza Seventeen

So never will wine-red rose or white,   Petal by petal, fall On that stretch of mud and sand that lies   By the hideous prison-wall, To tell the men who tramp the yard   That God’s Son died for all.

Never, in the prison, will a red or white rose bloom. Never will its petals touch the “mud and sand” and serve as a reminder to the men that “God’s Son died for all.” Wilde believes deeply that beauty will heal mankind and remind the men of the powers of God and the sacrifices of Christ.

Stanza Eighteen

Yet though the hideous prison-wall   Still hems him round and round, And a spirit man not walk by night   That is with fetters bound, And a spirit may not weep that lies   In such unholy ground,

Although the body of Wooldridge is interred in such “hideous” prison ground, the man is not disturbed. His spirit does not weep.

Stanza Nineteen

He is at peace—this wretched man—   At peace, or will be soon: There is no thing to make him mad,   Nor does Terror walk at noon, For the lampless Earth in which he lies   Has neither Sun nor Moon.

Wooldridge is at peace, or “will be soon.” He does not hold any anger for his life, there is nothing that will “make him mad.” Additionally, there is nothing to disturb him. There is not a moon or sun where he is now.

Stanza Twenty

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:   They did not even toll A requiem that might have brought   Rest to his startled soul, But hurriedly they took him out,   And hid him in a hole.

The warders of the prison treated him as “beast” and hanged him thus. The men did not even speak a “requiem” or a piece about the dead man that could have eased the man’s soul. They “hurried” him into his grave as if they could not “hid him” fast enough.

Stanza Twenty-One

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,   And gave him to the flies; They mocked the swollen purple throat   And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud   In which their convict lies.

What little Wooldridge had left was stripped from him. He lost his “canvas clothes” and was given over to the flies. The warders are painted in a very bad light here as Wilde imagines them laughing over the body and making fun of the man’s “swollen purple throat.” With laughter they covered the man with lime.

Stanza Twenty-Two

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray   By his dishonored grave: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross   That Christ for sinners gave, Because the man was one of those   Whom Christ came down to save.

The chaplain of the prison would not even kneel over the grave to say a prayer. It did not receive the “blessed Cross” that was meant to help sinner. Christ gave himself for the sinners of the world but this sinner, Wooldridge, did not even have a cross placed on his grave.

Yet all is well; he has but passed   To Life’s appointed bourne: And alien tears will fill for him   Pity’s long-broken urn, For his mourner will be outcast men,   And outcasts always mourn.

This section concludes with the speaker saying that even though all these terrible things have happen, “all is well.” The man has passed on, as fate appointed. There are tears spilled for him, but they are only from “outcast men” who can be disregarded. As “outcasts always mourn.”

I know not whether Laws be right,   Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol   Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year,   A year whose days are long.

In the second to last section of the poem Wilde attempts to make some conclusions about the justice systems. He begins by hedging his bet saying that he does not know whether the laws of the justice system are right or wrong. He only knows that those in “gaol” know, that the “wall is strong” and that the days are endlessly long. He is concerned with the physical here, not philosophical matters of justice.

But this I know, that every Law   That men have made for Man, Since first Man took his brother’s life,   And the sad world began, But straws the wheat and saves the chaff   With a most evil fan.

Wilde does say that he knows that every law that was made, since Cain killed Abel, has only made the situation worse. Any attempt to regulate what man does has only taken the world backward. It is as if humankind is throwing away the “wheat” but saving the “chaff.”

This too I know—and wise it were   If each could know the same— That every prison that men build   Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see   How men their brothers maim.

Apparently, Wilde does know a number of things about prison and continues on to say that he also understands that all prisons are built with “bricks of shame.” Man has built these buildings in an attempt to hide from God and Christ the things that man does to his brothers.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,   And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell,   For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man   Ever should look upon!

The bars they built in these places block out the “gracious moon” and blind man from the “goodly sun.” Wilde knows that man should be hiding his acts away, if this is how he is going to behave. These things should not be looked upon by the “Son of God nor son of Man.”

The vilest deeds like poison weeds   Bloom well in prison-air: It is only what is good in Man   That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,   And the Warder is Despair

Prison is a prime breeding ground for the “vilest deeds” that mankind can come up with. Vileness reproduces and goodness withered away. It is as if “Anguish” is guarding the gate of the building and the “Warder is Despair.”

For they starve the little frightened child   Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,   And gibe the old and grey, And some grow mad, and all grow bad, And none a word may say.

Wilde paints the prisoners in Reading Gaol as being “little frightened children” that weep as they are “starved.” The prisoners are made weak, and the warders “flog the fools. Everyone is mistreated and no one can say anything against the officials for fear of retaliation.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell   Is foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death   Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust   In Humanity’s machine.

The cells that the prisoners are forced to inhabit are “foul” and “dark.” The small rooms are filled with the smells, and presence, of “Death.” The smell destroys everything else except for lust, which is overwhelming.

The brackish water that we drink   Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales   Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks   Wild-eyed and cries to Time.

Wilde continues on to describe other conditions of the prison. The water they drink is “brackish” and dirty. And the bread is bitter and so dense that the warders have to “weigh [it] in scales.”

But though lean Hunger and green Thirst   Like asp with adder fight, We have little care of prison fare,   For what chills and kills outright Is that every stone one lifts by day   Becomes one’s heart by night.

The food there is so repellent that even though “hunger and green Thirst” are continual, they are moved to quench them. This does not kill the men. The thing that is their greatest burden is that which weighs on their hearts at night.

With midnight always in one’s heart,   And twilight in one’s cell, We turn the crank, or tear the rope,   Each in his separate Hell, And the silence is more awful far   Than the sound of a brazen bell.

Each man must live in his “separate hell” and deal with his own problems. These issues are exacerbated by the silence of the night which is far worse than the prison bell that rings to signify morning.

And never a human voice comes near   To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door   Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot,   With soul and body marred.

This incredible hell in which they are living is never lifted. Not one person reaches out and tries to speak to them with a “gentle word.” Everything is “hard,” and all eyes are without pity. There is no one there to comfort them and no one to remember them as they “rot” away.

And thus we rust Life’s iron chain   Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep,   And some men make no moan: But God’s eternal Laws are kind   And break the heart of stone.

All the men rust in prison, “degraded and alone.” There are some that weep and others who curse and moan. No matter what one man, or all men, may do, nothing can change God’s laws.

And every human heart that breaks,   In prison-cell or yard, Is as that broken box that gave   Its treasure to the Lord, And filled the unclean leper’s house   With the scent of costliest nard.

The broken hearts of the men resemble the box given to Christ in Mark 14:3. A woman bore the box to Christ, and broke it over his head; it was filled with expensive perfume.

The hearts of the men are like a gift to God. They are broken, twisted, gifts that need Christ.

Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break   And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan   And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart   May Lord Christ enter in?

It is with a broken heart that one might be forgiven, Wilde states. There is no better way for Christ to enter in.

And he of the swollen purple throat.   And the stark and staring eyes, Waits for the holy hands that took   The Thief to Paradise; And a broken and a contrite heart   The Lord will not despise.

Wooldridge is awaiting this same pleasure. He, with his “swollen purple throat,” is waiting for the “holy hands” to come and lift him up. The Lord does not hate those who have admitted their wrongs, and have opened their broken hearts to him.

The man in red who reads the Law   Gave him three weeks of life, Three little weeks in which to heal   His soul of his soul’s strife, And cleanse from every blot of blood   The hand that held the knife.

When Wooldridge’s sentence was passed down he was given three weeks to live. It was in these three weeks that he healed his soul and became closer to God. He cleansed himself of his deed.

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,   The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood,   And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain   Became Christ’s snow-white seal.

Wilde concludes this section by saying that Wooldridge used his own tears to clean the hand that killed his wife. He had to break in order to pay his dues for what he’d done. It is only with tears that one “can heal” and turn the “crimson stain” to “snow-white.”

In Reading gaol by Reading town   There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man   Eaten by teeth of flame, In burning winding-sheet he lies,   And his grave has got no name.

Wooldridge is in what Wilde refers to as a “pit of shame.” It is a grave and in it, he is covered in lime. The acid eats away at his bones that are entombed in a grave that has “got no name.”

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,   In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear,   Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved,   And so he had to die.

Wilde asks that the body be left to lie there until the return of Christ. There is no need, he says, for anyone to cry over his body or death. Wilde knows this man “killed the thing he loved,” and that his death was justified.

And all men kill the thing they love,   By all 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!

Once more Wilde reiterates the refrain of the poem, solidifying that this same fate could, and will, in some manner or another, happen to every man.

About Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Ireland in October of 1854. As a young child Wilde attended Portora Royal School where he was first introduced to Greek and Roman studies, a passion which would stay with him his entire life. He was a bright child and often won awards. After graduating, Wilde attended Trinity College in Dublin and while there received the Foundation Scholarship, the highest award given to undergraduate students. He would continue to receive awards during his schooling and upon his graduation. One of which, the Demyship Scholarship, allowed him to study at Magdalen College in Oxford.

After graduating from Magdalen, Wilde moved permanently to London. In 1881 he published his first collection, Poems.   The next year Wilde toured America giving a total of 140 lectures in nine months. He met with a number of notable literary figures while traveling, including, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. After returning home he continued to lecture, traveling through England and Ireland until 1884. It was during this time that Wilde established himself as a leader of the “ aesthetic movement ,” or the idea that one should live by a set of beliefs advocating beauty as having it’s own worth, rather than as a tool of promotion for other viewpoints.That same year Wilde married Constance Lloyd with whom he would have two sons.

In 1888 Wilde entered his most creative and productive years. He published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, as well as his only novel The Picture of Dorian Grey. At the time of it’s publication critics and readers were outraged by it’s content and apparent homosexual undertones . While his novel was not received well, he was enjoying success from several plays, such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.

During this same time period Wilde was deeply involved in an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, more commonly known as Bosie. Bosie’s father, outraged by the affair, wrote a note to Wilde addressed, “Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite” (an accidental misspelling of “sodomite”). Wilde’s choice to sue Bosie’s father for libel ruined his life.

In 1895, after a trial and conviction for “gross indecency,” Wilde spent two years in prison under forced labor conditions. This sentence took a great toll on the writer and in 1897, after being released, Wilde moved to London. His last great work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was completed in 1898. Oscar Wilde died in 1900 of an ear infection that had been contracted, and untreated, in prison.

Similar Poems

Readers who enjoyed ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ should also consider reading some of WIlde’s other best-known poems. For example,  ‘Her Voice’  and ‘ The Garden of Eros.’  The latter describes England as a metaphorical gaden of flowers that plays host to memories of English poets.  ‘her Voice ’  comes from a female perspective . She describes the facts of her relationship and how she has to accempt that it’s going to end. Another poem of interest may be  ‘ The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’  by John Betjeman. In it, he describes the last moments before the police come to take while to prison.

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Baldwin, Emma. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/oscar-wilde/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol/ . Accessed 16 August 2024.

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A Summary and Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Here’s a question for you: which great work did Oscar Wilde write while imprisoned in Reading Gaol? Not The Ballad of Reading Gaol – that was written while he was in exile in France following his release from prison – but De Profundis , his long letter to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) sees Wilde reflecting on the nature of sin, crime, love, 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 Ballad 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 six-line stanzas: 654 lines in all. Wilde dedicated the poem to a fellow prisoner, Charles Thomas Woolridge (‘C. T. W.’), a soldier who had been convicted for murdering his wife and who was hanged in Reading Gaol in July 1896 – the first execution that had taken place at the prison for eighteen years.

Woolridge is the ‘He’ of the poem’s opening stanzas, and also the inspiration for the recurring refrain: ‘ Each man kills the thing he loves .’ Although Wilde never met Woolridge, he had observed him in the prison yard on several occasions.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published in February 1898 not under Wilde’s name 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 there immediately: first of all, in March 1895, he was at Newgate, then at Pentonville, before being moved to Wandsworth, and then finally, in November 1895, to Reading.

And the poem is, in summary, a meditation on his experience 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 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.

There are several factual errors in this stanza pertaining to Woolridge: as a member of the Royal Horse Guards, he did not wear the usual scarlet coat worn by British soldiers, but a blue 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 wife in a bed which they had formerly shared for lovemaking neatly summarises the deadly relationship between destructive hate and romantic love 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 man must be feeling:

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.

Wilde then contrasts the condemned man’s fate with that of the other prisoners, including himself: they, too, have ‘killed the thing they love’, in one way or another, but they have not been sentenced to die:

He does not 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 black, With the yellow face of Doom.

In the second part of the poem, Wilde homes in on Woolridge again, noting the condemned guardsman’s behaviour:

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

Indeed, Woolridge has a step which is ‘light and gay’: behaviour which seems at odds with the man’s imminent fate.

As with so many aspects of The Ballad of Reading Gaol – the idea of killing what you love being the most obvious – we are presented with a paradox, that intellectual puzzle which Wilde had made one of the hallmarks of his wit when he was the toast of British society. Now, the paradoxes have become darker and more sombre, but they still encase an apparent contradiction.

For strange it was to see him pass With a step so light and gay, And strange it was to see him look So wistfully at the day, And strange it 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 wife in the street; he announced that he would have turned the weapon (a razor) on himself if it had not fallen from his hand. So he seemed resigned to his own death. This explains his apparent acceptance of the sentence.

So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray.

This is ambiguous: ‘end[ing] the self-same way’, does Wilde mean untimely death (e.g. by one’s own hand) or execution for murder? The phrase ‘red Hell’, suggesting the red mist of murderous anger, implies the latter: even the mildest and most placid man may be driven to murder, Wilde seems to imply, by his passions. There is a sense of sympathy and kinship with the condemned guardsman here, a sense of ‘there 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 us to condemn all killers as mere psychopaths or deviants. Woolridge was not 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 let him off his horrible crime, of course, but is not the same as dismissing him as an inhuman monster: a fine but important distinction.

In Debtors’ Yard the stones are hard, And the dripping wall is high, So it was there he took the air Beneath the leaden sky, And by each side a Warder walked, For fear the man might die.

Another 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 live, but because they want to make sure he his executed in the proper way, by the State. If the prisoner fell or contrived to take his own life, the State would be robbed of its retribution and punishment:

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

Wilde then goes on to detail some of the harsh tasks he and his fellow prisoners were told to carry 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.

Death is never far behind: each prisoner’s cell is ‘his numbered tomb’ (Wilde’s was C.3.3., of course). They are dead men walking, corpses that live and breathe: another paradox. And the night before Woolridge is to hang, things take a Gothic turn:

That night the empty corridors Were full of forms of Fear, And up and down the iron 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 debate, but this section of the poem is preoccupied with night terrors, ‘phantoms’, and notions of haunting. There is also 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 above.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol : analysis

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 poem ‘Ravenna’. His earliest published works were poems and poetry collections. (We have selected some of his finest poems here .)

But as his career took off and Wilde became, in a sense, the first 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. It was only after his conviction 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, considering this the ideal form to reflect his prison experience.

The oft-quoted refrain from The Ballad of Reading Gaol , ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, is not just about Charles Thomas Woolridge, of course.

It is also a reflection of Wilde’s own downfall and his tempestuous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) and his even more disastrous run-in with Bosie’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry, whose accusation of Wilde as a ‘somdomite’ (sic) led Wilde to take the Marquis to court. Subsequently, Wilde himself was charged with ‘gross indecency’ for his relations with other men, and it was this that led to the well-known court case in 1895.

Indeed, the idea that Wilde was reflecting upon his own life as he was portraying Woolridge’s seems clear from one of the most famous stanzas in The Ballad 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 kiss, 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 authorities by kissing him), much as Wilde’s own relationship with Bosie had been the kiss of death.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is written in six-line stanzas: strictly speaking, it is not a conventional ballad (we have collected some of the finest traditional ballads in a separate post ), but an adaptation of the four-line ballad form, which is rhymed abcb (Wilde adds an extra couple of lines to his stanza, rhymed db ). The metre of the poem is alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter, as we find 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 DRIFT- / ing CLOUD / that WENT With SAILS / of SIL- / ver BY.

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

About Oscar Wilde

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

But above all, it is Wilde’s plays that he continues to be known for, and these include witty drawing-room comedies such as Lady Windermere’s Fan , A Woman of No Importance , and The Importance of Being Earnest , as well as a Biblical drama, Salome (which was banned from performance in the UK and had to be staged abroad).

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Poems & Poets

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

I 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 gray; 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. 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." 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 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 space. He does not sit with silent men Who watch him night and day; Who watch him when he tries to weep, And when he tries to pray; Who watch him lest himself should rob The prison of its prey. He does not 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 black, With the yellow face of Doom. He does not rise in piteous haste To put on convict-clothes, While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes Each new and nerve-twitched pose, Fingering a watch whose little ticks Are like horrible hammer-blows. He does not know that sickening thirst That sands one's throat, before The hangman with his gardener's gloves Slips through the padded door, And binds one with three leathern thongs, That the throat may thirst no more. He does not bend his head to hear The Burial Office read, Nor while the terror of his soul Tells him he is not dead, Cross his own coffin, as he moves Into the hideous shed. He does not stare upon the air Through a little roof of glass: He does not pray with lips of clay For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek The kiss of Caiaphas. II Six weeks the guardsman walked the yard, In the suit of shabby gray: His 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 wandering cloud that trailed Its ravelled fleeces by. He did not wring his hands, as do Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun, And drank the morning air. He did not wring his hands nor weep, Nor did he peek or pine, But he drank the air as though it held Some healthful anodyne; With open mouth he drank the sun As though it had been wine! And I and all the souls in pain, Who tramped the other ring, Forgot if we ourselves had done A great or little thing, And watched with gaze of dull amaze The man who had to swing. For strange it was to see him pass With a step so light and gay, And strange it was to see him look So wistfully at the day, And strange it was to think that he Had such a debt to pay. For oak and elm have pleasant leaves That in the spring-time shoot: But grim to see is the gallows-tree, With its alder-bitten root, And, green or dry, a man must die Before it bears its fruit! The loftiest place is that seat of grace For which all worldlings try: But who would stand in hempen band Upon a scaffold high, And through a murderer's collar take His last look at the sky? It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air! So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray. At last the dead man walked no more Amongst the Trial Men, And I knew that he was standing up In the black dock's dreadful pen, And that never would I see his face In God's sweet world again. Like two doomed ships that pass in storm We had crossed each other's way: But we made no sign, we said no word, We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night, But in the shameful day. A prison wall was round us both, Two outcast men we were: The world had thrust us from its heart, And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin Had caught us in its snare. III In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard, And the dripping wall is high, So it was there he took the air Beneath the leaden sky, And by each side a Warder walked, For fear the man might die. Or else he sat with those who watched His anguish night and day; Who watched him when he rose to weep, And when he crouched to pray; Who watched him lest himself should rob Their scaffold of its prey. The Governor was strong upon The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract. And twice a day he smoked his pipe, And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad The hangman's hands were near. But why he said so strange a thing No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher's doom Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips, And make his face a mask. Or else he might be moved, and try To comfort or console: And what should Human Pity do Pent up in Murderer's Hole? What word of grace in such a place Could help a brother's soul? With slouch and swing around the ring We trod the Fools' Parade! We did not care: we knew we were The Devil's Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead Make a merry masquerade. 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. So still it lay that every day Crawled like a weed-clogged wave: And we forgot the bitter lot That waits for fool and knave, Till once, as we tramped in from work, We passed an open grave. With yawning mouth the yellow hole Gaped for a living thing; The very mud cried out for blood To the thirsty asphalte ring: And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair Some prisoner had to swing. Right in we went, with soul intent On Death and Dread and Doom: The hangman, with his little bag, Went shuffling through the gloom: And each man trembled as he crept Into his numbered tomb. That night the empty corridors Were full of forms of Fear, And up and down the iron town Stole feet we could not hear, And through the bars that hide the stars White faces seemed to peer. He lay as one who lies and dreams In a pleasant meadow-land, The watchers watched him as he slept, And could not understand How one could sleep so sweet a sleep With a hangman close at hand. But there is no sleep when men must weep Who never yet have wept: So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave— That endless vigil kept, And through each brain on hands of pain Another's terror crept. Alas! it is a fearful thing To feel another's guilt! For, right within, the sword of Sin Pierced to its poisoned hilt, And as molten lead were the tears we shed For the blood we had not spilt. The Warders with their shoes of felt Crept by each padlocked door, And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe, Gray figures on the floor, And wondered why men knelt to pray Who never prayed before. All through the night we knelt and prayed, Mad mourners of a corse! The troubled plumes of midnight were The plumes upon a hearse: And bitter wine upon a sponge Was the savour of Remorse. The gray cock crew, the red cock crew, But never came the day: And crooked shapes of Terror crouched, In the corners where we lay: And each evil sprite that walks by night Before us seemed to play. They glided past, they glided fast, Like travellers through a mist: They mocked the moon in a rigadoon Of delicate turn and twist, And with formal pace and loathsome grace The phantoms kept their tryst. With mop and mow, we saw them go, Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout They trod a saraband: And damned grotesques made arabesques, Like the wind upon the sand! With the pirouettes of marionettes, They tripped on pointed tread: But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear, As their grisly masque they led, And loud they sang, and long they sang, For they sang to wake the dead. "Oho!" they cried, "the world is wide, But fettered limbs go lame! And once, or twice, to throw the dice Is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin In the Secret House of Shame." No things of air these antics were, That frolicked with such glee: To men whose lives were held in gyves, And whose feet might not go free, Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things, Most terrible to see. Around, around, they waltzed and wound; Some wheeled in smirking pairs; With the mincing step of a demirep Some sidled up the stairs: And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer, Each helped us at our prayers. The morning wind began to moan, But still the night went on: Through its giant loom the web of gloom Crept till each thread was spun: And, as we prayed, we grew afraid Of the Justice of the Sun. The moaning wind went wandering round The weeping prison-wall: Till like a wheel of turning steel We felt the minutes crawl: O moaning wind! what had we done To have such a seneschal? At last I saw the shadowed bars, Like a lattice wrought in lead, Move right across the whitewashed wall That faced my three-plank bed, And I knew that somewhere in the world God's dreadful dawn was red. At six o'clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill. He did not pass in purple pomp, Nor ride a moon-white steed. Three yards of cord and a sliding board Are all the gallows' need: So with rope of shame the Herald came To do the secret deed. We were as men who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what was dead was Hope. For Man's grim Justice goes its way And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong, It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong, The monstrous parricide! We waited for the stroke of eight: Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose For the best man and the worst. We had no other thing to do, Save to wait for the sign to come: So, like things of stone in a valley lone, Quiet we sat and dumb: But each man's heart beat thick and quick, Like a madman on a drum! With sudden shock the prison-clock Smote on the shivering air, And from all the gaol rose up a wail Of impotent despair, Like the sound the frightened marshes hear From some leper in his lair. And as one sees most fearful things In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer the hangman's snare Strangled into a scream. And all the woe that moved him so That he gave that bitter cry, And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. IV There is no chapel on the day On which they hang a man: The Chaplain's heart is far too sick, Or his face is far too wan, Or there is that written in his eyes Which none should look upon. So they kept us close till nigh on noon, And then they rang the bell, And the Warders with their jingling keys Opened each listening cell, And down the iron stair we tramped, Each from his separate Hell. Out into God's sweet air we went, But not in wonted way, For this man's face was white with fear, And that man's face was gray, And I never saw sad men who looked So wistfully at the day. I never saw sad men who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed In happy freedom by. But there were those amongst us all Who walked with downcast head, And knew that, had each got his due, They should have died instead: He had but killed a thing that lived, Whilst they had killed the dead. For he who sins a second time Wakes a dead soul to pain, And draws it from its spotted shroud, And makes it bleed again, And makes it bleed great gouts of blood, And makes it bleed in vain! Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round, And no man spoke a word. Silently we went round and round, And through each hollow mind The Memory of dreadful things Rushed like a dreadful wind, And Horror stalked before each man, And Terror crept behind. The Warders strutted up and down, And kept their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span, And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at, By the quicklime on their boots. For where a grave had opened wide, There was no grave at all: Only a stretch of mud and sand By the hideous prison-wall, And a little heap of burning lime, That the man should have his pall. For he has a pall, this wretched man, Such as few men can claim: Deep down below a prison-yard, Naked for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot, Wrapt in a sheet of flame! And all the while the burning lime Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night, And the soft flesh by day, It eats the flesh and bone by turns, But it eats the heart alway. For three long years they will not sow Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky With unreproachful stare. They think a murderer's heart would taint Each simple seed they sow. It is not true! God's kindly earth Is kindlier than men know, And the red rose would but glow more red, The white rose whiter blow. Out of his mouth a red, red rose! Out of his heart a white! For who can say by what strange way, Christ brings His will to light, Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore Bloomed in the great Pope's sight? But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air; The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there: For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair. So never will wine-red rose or white, Petal by petal, fall On that stretch of mud and sand that lies By the hideous prison-wall, To tell the men who tramp the yard That God's Son died for all. Yet though the hideous prison-wall Still hems him round and round, And a spirit may not walk by night That is with fetters bound, And a spirit may but weep that lies In such unholy ground, He is at peace—this wretched man— At peace, or will be soon: There is no thing to make him mad, Nor does Terror walk at noon, For the lampless Earth in which he lies Has neither Sun nor Moon. They hanged him as a beast is hanged: They did not even toll A requiem that might have brought Rest to his startled soul, But hurriedly they took him out, And hid him in a hole. They stripped him of his canvas clothes, And gave him to the flies: They mocked the swollen purple throat, And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud In which their convict lies. The Chaplain would not kneel to pray By his dishonoured grave: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross That Christ for sinners gave, Because the man was one of those Whom Christ came down to save. Yet all is well; he has but passed To Life's appointed bourne: And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn. V I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long. But this I know, that every Law That men have made for Man, Since first Man took his brother's life, And the sad world began, But straws the wheat and saves the chaff With a most evil fan. This too I know—and wise it were If each could know the same— That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. With bars they blur the gracious moon, And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man Ever should look upon! The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison-air: It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair. For they starve the little frightened child Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool, And gibe the old and gray, And some grow mad, and all grow bad, And none a word may say. Each narrow cell in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine. The brackish water that we drink Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks Wild-eyed, and cries to Time. But though lean Hunger and green Thirst Like asp with adder fight, We have little care of prison fare, For what chills and kills outright Is that every stone one lifts by day Becomes one's heart by night. With midnight always in one's heart, And twilight in one's cell, We turn the crank, or tear the rope, Each in his separate Hell, And the silence is more awful far Than the sound of a brazen bell. And never a human voice comes near To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot, With soul and body marred. And thus we rust Life's iron chain Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep, And some men make no moan: But God's eternal Laws are kind And break the heart of stone. And every human heart that breaks, In prison-cell or yard, Is as that broken box that gave Its treasure to the Lord, And filled the unclean leper's house With the scent of costliest nard. Ah! happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in? And he of the swollen purple throat, And the stark and staring eyes, Waits for the holy hands that took The Thief to Paradise; And a broken and a contrite heart The Lord will not despise. The man in red who reads the Law Gave him three weeks of life, Three little weeks in which to heal His soul of his soul's strife, And cleanse from every blot of blood The hand that held the knife. And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain Became Christ's snow-white seal. VI In Reading gaol by Reading town There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man Eaten by teeth of flame, In a burning winding-sheet he lies, And his grave has got no name. And there, till Christ call forth the dead, In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. And all men kill the thing they love, By all 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.

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Sex, lies, and poetry: the ballad of reading gaol.

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Peter Robinson, Sex, Lies, and Poetry: The Ballad of Reading Gaol , The Cambridge Quarterly , Volume 44, Issue 4, December 2015, Pages 299–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfv024

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This article dwells upon instances of untrue statements in Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol . The colour of the executed trooper's coat is given as ‘scarlet’ when it was blue, and his wife's murder is portrayed as taking place ‘in bed’, when it happened at the street door of their house, or in the road nearby. The possibility that ‘each man’ does not kill ‘the thing he loves’ is addressed to explore complexities in Wilde's art related to aesthetic-politics in ‘The Decay of Lying’ and the discovery that, after a fashion, Wilde had been telling the truth all along.

After attending the first night of Lady Windermere's Fan on 20 February 1892, Henry James wrote three days later to Florence Bell: ‘Everything Oscar does is a deliberate trap for the literalist, & to see the literalist walk straight up to it & step straight into it, makes one freshly avert a discouraged gaze from this unspeakable animal.’ 1 This ‘unspeakable animal’ will be ‘the literalist’, though, since James had described Wilde a decade earlier as an ‘unclean beast’, perhaps the great novelist had sensed affinities between hunter and prey in the social cage of St James's Theatre that night. 2 Still, I have to confess my essay is written in the voice of such a literalist, one walking straight up to some of the evidence and asking what it means to say, what truths it has to express, and how to view it with hindsight. 3 The risk is, as James points out, that I too will ‘step straight into it’, and be caught out by what he calls ‘so much drollery – that is “cheeky” paradoxical wit’. 4 Doubtless I will, and if I do, you can always avert your gaze.

Yes, too, it has been, it is, hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting – so far as one can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a sickening horribility. It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all – of the mere exposure – that blurs the spectacle. But the fall – from nearly 20 years of a really unique kind of ‘brilliant’ conspicuity (wit, ‘art,’ conversation – ‘one of our 2 or 3 dramatists &c,’) to that sordid prison-cell & this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs & gloats – it is beyond any utterance of irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me – but this hideous human history has made him so – in a manner. 5

The novelist would also report that Wilde's fall could provide material for art. Writing to Alphonse Daudet on 10 November 1895, James passed on ‘des nouvelles du pitoyable Wilde’, his collapse under the regime of hard labour in Pentonville Prison. James had this news from an unnamed friend, whom Philip Horne identifies ‘almost certainly’ as Robert Burdon Haldane, the ‘homme politique’ who would persuade the Home Secretary to have Wilde transferred to HM Prison Reading. Haldane reported to James that he had found in Wilde ‘aucune faculté résistante ni récupérative’, and the author who would resist and recover from the disaster of Guy Domville 's opening on 6 January 1895, the same night An Ideal Husband opened, then added: ‘S'il l'avait, seulement, cette faculté, quel chef d'oeuvre il pourrait faire encore!’ 6

Wilde claims to have had his first thought for the last completed work to be published during his lifetime while in the dock of the Old Bailey. 7 Perhaps he recalled the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice and Bassanio's line to Shylock: ‘Do all men kill the things they do not love?’ to which he replies: ‘Hates any man the thing he would not kill?’ 8 Wilde would adapt these, it has been suggested, in his poem's most quoted variation on the proposition that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. 9 In November or December 1879, Wilde had written a sonnet called ‘Portia’ (dedicated to Ellen Terry, then performing the part), whose sestet embroils him in the plot of the play's trial scene:

In painful retrospect, Wilde had, like ‘that accursed Jew’ of conventional vilification, gone to the law unwisely to seek redress. He then had the law turned upon him by the ‘sober-suited’ wisdom of the not cross-dressing lawyer Sir Edward Carson, to the playwright's banishment and humiliation. Even Shylock being obliged to convert to Christianity has its analogy in the expectation that the convict should ‘reform’ in the aftermath of his sentence. 11 If Wilde recalled his sonnet, it would not have been a further instance of self-plagiarism, but rather an artist finding that events have compelled him to see earlier work with a suddenly transvalued hindsight. ‘Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes’, as Wilde's aphorism emerges from the mouth of Mr Dumby in Lady Windermere's Fan . 12 Living with hindsight, something many of us attempt, means acting in the light of an imagined retrospect that would foresee the consequences of present actions. Yet surely no one, not Haldane, James, or its author at that moment in the dock, could have predicted that a sufficient degree of resistance and recuperation, as well as his transfer from London prisons to a place close to Goring, Bracknell, and the Chilterns, would result in his final ‘chef d'oeuvre’ being The Ballad of Reading Gaol .

Its poet's compatriot and acquaintance, W. B. Yeats, doubted whether the poem was a ‘chef d'oeuvre’, or only ‘almost’ one, when proudly stating in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) that he had ‘stood in judgement upon Wilde, bringing into light a great, or almost great poem, as he himself had done had he lived; my work gave me that privilege’. Yeats is doubtless conscious in his phrasing that this was not the first time someone had ‘stood in judgement upon Wilde’, nor would it be the last, if his trials include those of the works and their posthumous reputation. Nor has this compulsion to judge him ceased, even with the renewed critical attention that occurred around the centenary of his downfall and imprisonment, even if hindsight was then intent on reversing the decision. Justifying the removal even of so famous a line as ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’, Yeats would write:

Now that I have plucked from the Ballad of Reading Gaol its foreign feathers it shows a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy, the contrary to all its author deliberately sought. I plucked out even famous lines because, effective in themselves, put into the Ballad they become artificial, trivial, arbitrary; a work of art can have but one subject. 13

Yet Wilde had partly sought Hardy's realism, while simultaneously believing with Yeats that ‘a work of art can have but one subject’. Writing to Robert Ross in October 1897, he admitted that his not yet published The Ballad of Reading Gaol ‘suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly, but as a whole I think the production interesting: that it is interesting from more points of view than one is artistically to be regretted.’ 14 He underlined its trafficking with vulgar realities and propagandistic balladry in a letter to Edward Strangman, describing himself as ‘out-Henleying Kipling’. 15 To understand the dividedness of Wilde's poem requires us to appreciate its aesthetic principle, the single point of view, which forms the evaluative contrast to his regrettably multiple-viewpointed production, and to see it captured in earlier poems that Yeats retrospectively characterised from the position of a young man ‘struggling for expression’ who would feel ‘contempt for the poetry of Oscar Wilde, considering it an exaggeration of every Victorian fault’. 16

Though commenting on passages that are ‘artificial, trivial, arbitrary’, including the assertion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, the Nobel laureate nevertheless began his redaction with Wilde's opening stanza:

Two details are inaccurate in this report on Charles Thomas Wooldridge's murder of his wife, Laura Ellen Wooldridge. Confined to Reading Gaol on 30 March 1896, he was condemned to death on 18 June, then hanged and interred in quicklime within the walls of the prison on 7 July 1896 – events alluded to in Wilde's dedication: ‘In Memoriam / C.T.W.’ The first inaccuracy is that he didn't ‘wear his scarlet coat’ then, or at any time, because the uniform of his regiment was blue; the second that his wife was not ‘murdered in her bed’, but had her throat slit three times either on the threshold of the house she had, after fifteen difficult months of marriage, requested him not to visit again, or, as is also reported, on the road near their home. 17 The first of these matters was aired on 7 July 1980, when an article in The Times by Garrett Anderson reports Wilde as saying: ‘I could hardly have written, “He did not wear his azure coat, for wine and blood are blue”’. 18 The exigencies of rhyme (‘red’, ‘dead’, ‘bed’) could also explain the removal of Laura's body from street to house. In the passage from De Profundis where he describes himself as standing ‘in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age’, Wilde claimed he had ‘altered the minds of men and the colours of things’. 19 That the detail of the scarlet coat folds so symbolically into the blood and wine of Christian sacrifice, while the murder taking place in ‘her bed’ adds conveniently to the theme of sexual jealousy motivating the crime, underline problems of art and untruth in Wilde's work, threads that he spun in the dialogic polemics of ‘The Decay of Lying’. W. E. Henley, who didn't like being out-Henleyed, took issue with the ‘red’ of the wine, by another parodying rewrite – ‘are privates in the Guards in the habit of spreeing on burgundy’ – adding that ‘“His hands were wet with beer and blood” would have made as good a line as C. 3.3 has made’. 20 But as Wilde asserted in De Profundis : ‘to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.’ 21 Yet whether those two inaccuracies in The Ballad of Reading Gaol are falsehoods is to be decided, while his fate during 1895 would have given him reason enough to encounter reality without art, life without fiction, and to doubt the extent to which he had ‘altered the minds’ of some men at least.

As regards the dedication: I wish to introduce the fact of his having been a Guardsman. He was, I believe, in the Second Life Guards ( Blues ), so it would run:  In Memoriam  C.T.W.  Trooper of H.M. Second Life Guards  Obiit … etc. But I know nothing about the technicalities of uniform. Do the Life Guards ( Blues ) wear blue uniforms? I cannot alter my poem if they do – to me his uniform was red. Only if they wear blue we had perhaps better omit the regiment. Could you ask someone? I believe they all wear red. 22

The published poem has him belonging to the Royal Horse Guards, called the Blues after their uniform. Wilde's letter wavers uneasily between a doubt about the factual basis of his poem, the artistic or aesthetic requirement not to alter his poetic detail (as if recalling the boast in De Profundis that he had altered the colour of things), the insistent subjectivity of asserting that ‘to me his uniform was red’, and then the mistaken belief that his subjectivity coincides, as it does not, with the truth of things.

Archeological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist stage effect; it is not its quality. And Lord Lytton's proposal that the dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value on the stage. This value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic; the former depends on the colour of the dress, the latter on its design and character. But so interwoven are the two that, whenever in our own day historical accuracy has been discarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from different ages, the result has been that the stage has been turned into that chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy Dress Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect. For the dresses of one age do not artistically harmonize with the dresses of another; and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes is to confuse the play. 23

Wilde's ‘dramatic and picturesque effect’ in The Ballad of Reading Gaol is served by the ‘scarlet’ of the uniform, but it discards historical accuracy and may confuse by weakening the truth of his poem. Though he excuses anachronism (Shakespeare's putting ‘Aristotle’ into the mouth of Hector) and error (Hugo's acknowledged mistaking of rouge for gueules in heraldry), 24 and despite what Vivian says in ‘The Decay of Lying’ about ‘careless habits of accuracy’, Wilde sides with correctness here. 25 Consistently inconsistent, he writes that ‘accuracy is merely a condition of illusionistic stage effect’ and ‘not its quality’: ‘the aesthetic value of Shakespeare's plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of the facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure’. Exaggerating for effect, Wilde immediately alters tack by adding that ‘still Shakespeare's use of facts is a most interesting part of his method of work’. 26

Nevertheless, this concession draws attention to the playwright's inventing or selecting facts in the interests of truth. The relation of fact to truth is not straightforward, and depends upon their not being thought the same thing. Wilde plays with the idea that in art facts and truth have nothing to do with each other, but there are many kinds of independence of a more relational kind by which two terms are distinct but interrelated. It is perfectly possible to lie and deceive by means of a careful selection of misleading facts. But it is difficult to imagine something being entirely true which flies in the face of all facts. The verbs that conventionally go with these nouns also speak volumes, for we are requested to state the facts, but to tell the truth. Wilde invented the ‘fact’ of the coat's colour for the sake of his poem, it not being a mere mistake because he was aware of the problem before publication. He had written: ‘the anachronisms are really few in number, and not very important, and, had Shakespeare's attention been drawn to them by a brother artist, he would probably have corrected them’. He adds that while they can hardly be called ‘blemishes’; they are not among the ‘great beauties of his work’, and, tellingly, that ‘their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasized unless the play is accurately mounted according to its proper date.’ 27

Even if a work of art's truth is not fatally flawed by an incidental error of fact, nevertheless, the truth of art depends upon a background expectation of factual accuracy even for its charming inconsistencies to be noticed. 28 So, in art, it would seem, the ‘truth’ of the scarlet coat flies in the face of the facts, even though the fact of the blue uniform may need to be known to make that artistic ‘truth’ visible. But did Wilde know the facts of the murder case involving Wooldridge? And would he have cared to adjust that part of his poem had he known? It seems unlikely, given what he says about the colour of the coat or when defending lines presenting the ‘shivering Chaplain robed in white’ and the Governor ‘all in shiny black’ with ‘the yellow face of Doom’ (p. 197): ‘The only people I have libelled in the poem are the Reading warders. They were – most of them – as good as possible to me. But to poetry all must be sacrificed, even warders.’ 29 Defending his poem against libel anxieties from the Chiswick Press, who printed the first edition, he admits to misrepresenting only those who would and could not take his printer to court, suggesting conditions to what might be sacrificed in poetry for the sake of its truth.

In the final stanza to Wilde's poem, one Yeats does not include in his conflation, we find again the poem's most famous assertion, a statement that may not be true either:

These lines are interpreted by Regenia Gagnier as referring not only to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’: ‘The taboo against homosexual love and, as in C.T.W.'s case, against any love whose fruits were not sanctioned by the state, rendered such love destructive: just as it rendered the lovers enemies, each potentially capable of causing the social downfall of the other’, and she concludes that therefore ‘the only honest love, and the most profound, would be open destruction in the face of society’. 30 Yet Gagnier's claim about the legal enforcement of taboos is blurred by her comparison with the jealous wife-murder – the fruit, presumably, not sanctioned by the state in that case. Wilde universalises his assertion and would have everyone accept the truth that ‘all men kill the thing they love’, ‘By each let this be heard’. But his polemic against capital punishment appeared confused to an anonymous American reviewer in June 1899: ‘Is it, that the homicide who suffered in Reading Gaol was no more death-worthy, though with actual blood upon his hands, than are the thousands who do not thus suffer, although they ( morally speaking) may “kill the thing they love”?’ 31

That readers don't ask if it is true that each and every man kills the thing he loves and the coward, like Judas, does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword, suggests that they take the poem to be referring only to others' loves, loves that have collided with legal constraints, whether justified or not. With hindsight we can see that the 1885 Labouchère Amendment to the 1865 Act outlawing ‘gross indecency’ between men was unjust and needed repealing. Parts of the American legal system and many British citizens still don't believe that intentional murder should not incur the death penalty. Yet, none of us, I think, would put forward a case for the decriminalisation of uxoricide. These reflections only add to perplexity about how to respond to the poem's close. The stanza about the Judas kiss and the brave man's sword could look to be complicit with charges of prejudicial ‘effeminacy’ – by pointedly contrasting Wooldridge with Alfred Douglas. 32 Yet the truth of the murder case doesn't place the soldier in the position of such a ‘heroic’ killing, though it might indicate what outre-Manche would be called a crime passionnel , while what links them in their abusive relationships also divides them in that Laura and Wilde were the immediate victims. The trooper, subject to extreme sexual jealousy, had procured the razor before going to visit his wife in their house near Windsor, suggesting premeditated intent. Are we meant to see the poem's dedicatee as brave in cutting his wife's throat, poetically ‘in bed’ and with ‘a knife, because’, unlike the incarcerated, the ‘dead so soon grow cold’ (p. 196)?

Though the ‘central idea, half, but not more than half, a paradox’ 33 that Wilde employs as the ending to his poem does not have the wittily exaggerated truth of his memorable aphorisms, this doesn't make those statements lies, for the fundamental requirement of the lie, even the little white one, is that it intends to deceive. So how then do these different fallings away from truth in the first and last stanzas of Wilde's poem appear in the light of the polemic for artistic licence in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891)? What's more, can Wilde's consistently inconsistent utterances and the volatility of his attitudes to people and ideas be seen as the expression of a consistent strategy? Or may they be understood as the efforts of someone intent on exposing hypocrisies and falsities with which his own inconsistencies and self-contradictions are inevitably complicit? Would Wilde have been so casual about the coat's hue had he been wearing it? James McNeill Whistler accused him, in the aftermath of the latter's 1883 lecture to students at the Royal Academy, of being as slapdash about clothing and painting as he was about the accurate attribution of his views: ‘Oscar – with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions … of others!’ 34

His imitations of Whistler's Thames embankment paintings are Wilde's nearest approach to the ideal of a unified artistic effect, as in ‘Impression du Matin’, first published on 2 March 1881:

Wilde used the same colour scheme in the hindsight of his post-imprisonment stage directions for the appearance of Mrs Cheveley in An Ideal Husband : ‘Lips very thin and highly-coloured, a line of scarlet on a pallid face’. 35 ‘Impression du Matin’ and Wilde's other Symbolist-derived poems underline what he meant by saying the intentions and effects of The Ballad of Reading Gaol were divided. He spells out the aesthetic ideal in his February 1885 review of ‘Mr Whistler's Ten o'Clock’ where he ‘spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces, and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air’. 36 As Vivian says of London smog in ‘The Decay of Lying’: ‘people see fogs’ because ‘poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects’ and, as if to tell a lie, that they ‘did not exist till Art had invented them’. 37

There are three reasons, though, why this last is not a lie either: first, because it is not intending to deceive; second, because ‘as reviewers of Intentions pointed out, it threatens to collapse into a reasonable proposition’, for no one ‘denies that culture conditions our way of seeing’; 38 and, third, because the scientific arts of man that Wilde was opposing in ‘The Decay of Lying’ did invent those London fogs – an idea Ruskin had asserted some five years earlier in his two lectures The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). At the time, Ruskin's argument was thought an outrageous exaggeration, differing from Vivian's attitude not in its implausibility, but in its earnestness. The difference is significant: outrageously exaggerated manifest ‘lies’ are a commonly used form of truth-telling, as can be seen in the assertion that ‘In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people’ 39 – where the truth lies in its stated implication that Japan and the Japanese should be understood as, in their humanity, no more nor less artistic than ourselves. The remark is, in fact, a sensible caution against the cult of Japonisme . Similarly, and with hindsight, we can see that what both Ruskin and Wilde said about smog was and is true. Wilde will have read Ruskin's lecture, and may have been borrowing from it for what he pretends to be an outrageous impossibility so as to insinuate a better way of thinking about relations between art and nature which had long been troubled, much to Ruskin's disgust, by our activities beyond any plain distinction between God's and our works.

Of the common things not ‘lost in exquisite and evanescent effects’ but, rather, made to stand out in the fog, is the prostitute of Wilde's final verse, that ‘one pale woman all alone’ with her ‘lips of flame and heart of stone’. The attributes of this figure are both clichéd and ambivalent, so that her having a ‘heart of stone’ may be transvalued by our sympathy. She's not hard-hearted, perhaps, but obliged to be so by the profession in which she is caught. 40 Still, the poem's final note is decisively uncertain, and that too matches, on a meaning level, the ‘exquisite and evanescent’ mistiness of a Whistler ‘étude’. Wilde's homage to the American painter is also competitive for, as he writes in his review of ‘Mr Whistler's Ten o'Clock’: ‘The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche.’ 41 This remark is aimed at Whistler's assertion that only painters should judge of painting, an after-effect of the Ruskin–Whistler trial of November 1878 in which artwork, artist, critic, public, paint-pot, and the legal system were placed at odds in the interests of a contested idea of intrinsic value, whose outcome was a temporary defeat for art in the awarding of that farthing's-worth of damages. 42 In the year of Wilde's graduation from Oxford, the value of these aesthetic effects of harmony, in a picture of fireworks at night, its spots of colour on a contrasting ground, prompted Whistler's riposte in court regarding the labour value of his production, the price asked being not for two days' labour but for ‘knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime’. 43

Whistler would accuse Wilde of plagiarism in 1890, 44 suggesting he be punished by ‘picking oakum’, which he would soon do and then record in The Ballad of Reading Gaol :

Yet ‘Impression du Matin’ and similar lyrics constitute Wilde's homage to Whistler – and he never did conceal his indebtedness to this painter, or to Walter Pater. Earlier in The Ballad , Wilde had written that ‘none can tell to what red Hell | His sightless soul may stray’ (p. 199). These colour values are one attempt at an artistic unity, including a focal highlight, the scarlet lips of the prostitute amidst the fog in ‘Impression du Matin’ echoed in the trooper's said-to-be-scarlet coat, and the grey colour of his prison uniform.

In the second stanza of the Ballad , Trooper Wooldridge is pictured taking exercise while still awaiting his trial for murder. His ‘scarlet coat’ is contrasted with his prison uniform, grey with black arrows, including a ‘cricket cap’ that is the large-visor hat 45 prisoners were required to wear to make it more difficult for them to see and communicate (the latter a punishable offence) with those around them:

Wooldridge gave himself up, and was intent on being executed for his crime. His wistfulness may reflect more his amorous regrets than fear of judicial death. The colour scheme of the Ballad includes this running contrast between red and grey, in the colour of the prison uniforms and other surroundings, so that the scarlet and the red stand out as either sins or their punishments, for while ‘neither milk-white rose nor red | May bloom in prison-air’ (p. 211), at the same time ‘I knew that somewhere in the world | God's dreadful dawn was red’ (p. 206).

In The Picture of Dorian Gray , a book that never describes an act of physical intimacy between men, many readers think they recognize a particular notion of homosexual identity. Their reading is in various ways impure. It derives from both Wilde's text and Wilde's life, following a hermeneutic protocol used at the Old Bailey, where Wilde's book was judged by the author, and vice versa; it is always a retrospective reading, informed not only by what the author wrote but by how its author came to be written in the history of his culture. 46

He later adds: ‘To modern readers, with the blindness (in this case) of hindsight, one of the most puzzling questions about Wilde's intentions is whether he expected or wanted his sexuality to figure in his public image.’ 47 The dialogues and essays of Intentions are threaded with remarks that echo in the light of the events of four years later. Its concern with relations between fact and fiction, truth and fact, art and criticism, sin, crime, beauty, and truth is backlit by the consequences of his decision to go to court against the Marquis of Queensbury, the collapse of that trial and the subsequent Crown prosecutions against Wilde himself. Yet there are, then, at least two degrees of hindsight that come into play: not only can we not fail to read the observations made by Gilbert and Ernest in the light of what would soon happen to their author, but we read that in relation to what has evolved in the British legal system's position on homosexual acts, and on the relative, still partial, social acceptance of same-sex relationships.

If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. 48

The impact of Nietzsche could lie behind this, and it may have come true, in a certain light, that Wilde's sins now figure the promise of a more understanding culture, as regards the varieties of possible sexual life. But that would be too simplified, not least because what Gilbert says is merely that progress depends upon the unpredictable transformation of values, but what makes a culture more splendid might point to the maintenance and support of values including moral ones already present in that society (as in the Christianity of both De Profundis and the Ballad ) about which this passage has nothing overtly to say. 49

Gilbert claims that ‘It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.’ 50 Normality and sexual deviance, monogamy and prostitution are implicit in this assertion growing out of reflections on the Magdalen and Lucrece, and the view that sex workers protected the virtue of married women. Yet, as regards The Ballad of Reading Gaol , what social gain from his crime does the execution of Charles Thomas Wooldridge conceal from us? Even here, the extension to us all of the assertion that ‘all men kill the thing they love’ might justify leniency as regards the sentence for wife-murder, but wouldn't condone it. Perhaps Wooldridge could be considered, rather, one of the semi-fictitious props in another of Wilde's performances, a prop not unlike Wainewright the poisoner, or characters in his fictions such as the boy actor Willie Hughes or Dorian Gray.

Yet such a possibility raises the Petrarchan difficulty apropos of his Laura – far from irrelevant to the critical history of Shakespeare's sonnets – regarding what happens to historical persons when they are made the object of a poem's evocations. Defending Dorian Gray , Wilde had pointed out that the ‘function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such people.’ 51 Even if the Rhymers' Club poet John Gray was one model for Wilde's eponymous character, in this case too he is not lying. Yet his phrasing reminds us that, like the Japanese, who did and do exist, so, contrasting with the unnamed governor, chaplain, hangman, and warders in The Ballad of Reading Gaol , the ‘In Memoriam / C.T.W.’ of the poem's dedication, echoing the ‘Mr. W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.’ of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609), points to no Willie Hughes but to the factually documented Charles Thomas Wooldridge, his crime, punishment, and, in ‘Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards’, the regimental colour of his coat. 52

In referring disparagingly to the divided aims of The Ballad of Reading Gaol , Wilde had stooped to moralise his song, and then, at least partially, regretted it; but it is the artistic impurity of his poem that grants it its tortured and tortuous force, and it is this mixture of aims that points it towards the poetry of the coming century, making Wilde's Whistlerian poems such as ‘Impression du Matin’ merely one of the colours in the palette of modern and modernist poetry. 53 This is among the paradoxes in Yeats's anthologising the Ballad in 1936. For by locating it, in an edited-down version, with Pater's prose poem on the Mona Lisa , which Yeats had lineated as free verse, he rightly places it as part of the founding materials for poetry's future developments; but by editing out the more fin-de-siècle flourishes, and turning it into something resembling a Hardyesque realist ballad, he lessens the inner tensions of style and purpose that would be enlarged upon to near breaking point in the aesthetic and cultural commitments of, for instance, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land . Rather than criticising Wilde's poem for its near-greatness, or objecting to its willingness to ignore a fact about a regimental uniform in the interests of a symbolic colour scheme, I would see its compromised performance as at the heart of Wilde's value – for if the mask doesn't slip, its truth cannot be glimpsed. The truth of a provocative artist is in what is provoked; but since that cannot by definition be controlled, this truth will be volatile and subject to levels of retrospective revision in the hindsight of his own life, and his evolving posthumous reputation.

Since the truth, not pure and never simple, is something that we tell , it is unavoidably linked to acts and to doing. Even in ‘The Critic as Artist’ what Wilde calls ‘doing nothing’ is still ‘doing’, and the attempt to exemplify nothing-but-contemplation in a pose is itself doomed, for even to contemplate is to do. Action, in however minimal a form, is an aspect of time-bound existence. This relational contrast of doing and contemplating may have the air of a pre-emptive strike against the criminal acts of which Wilde would be found guilty. The pun in to ‘act’ and to ‘perform’ is relevant here, both being truer representations of what it is to live than the harsher contrast (used to pirouette upon) in ‘to be’ and ‘to do’. In ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, Wilde writes of ‘all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one's own personality’ then ‘to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem’. 54 But to say this involves being deaf to what ‘acting’ also means, for to pretend is also and always really to do something, and really to do something even on a stage is to combine the ethical and the aesthetical in a single (though complex) action – which allows Wittgenstein's remark, first penned a mere twenty years after Wilde's trial, a further range of implication: ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one.’ 55

Danson addresses this issue by noting how the supposedly separate spheres of ethics and aesthetics cannot be kept apart: ‘repeatedly, in his letters and in “The Critic as Artist”, the separate spheres merge (as they must) when art's superiority to morals becomes, itself, a moral issue’. 56 The slide here from ‘the separation of art from ethics to preserve the privileged space of Art’ to ‘art's superiority to morals’ is itself a plummet from a ‘sphere’ of thought and conceptualisation (‘ethics’), to a particular set of values and standards in a historical moment, to ‘morals’. Aesthetics can be on a level, can be ‘one’, with ethics, but not with ‘morals’ – a word which in this case is referring to the attitudes of the period to homosexuality, ones enshrined in the law that was used to destroy Wilde. ‘Ethics’, as a sphere, includes the values and thoughts that can be employed to deplore the Labouchère Amendment, the conduct of the legal profession and the government in Wilde's trials, and the regime as enforced by some of its staff at HM Prison Reading in the 1890s. What's more, ethics and aesthetics do not suddenly merge when art is employed to criticise morals, for the possibility that Wilde might attempt such a thing in his poem means that they could not have, strictly, been separate in the first place. They are ‘one’ in that they both engage in and require evaluative judgement focused on words naturally used in the supposed spheres, words such as ‘good’ and ‘fair’. Though ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ are not synonyms, their related language overlaps and can be discriminated in innumerable situations. It is why a poem such as The Ballad of Reading Gaol can contain both truths and untruths, be at different points beautiful, ugly to good effect, and exaggeratedly garish – as in the case of the scarlet coat.

Danson also notes that ‘in 1890/1 Wilde was talking to journalists, and in 1895 he was talking to the judge; for neither of them was the argument from separate spheres even comprehensible’. 57 Yet while his argument may be comprehensible, it is not true; so I might appear to be on the side of those prosecuting Wilde. Rather, what I am objecting to in the ‘separate spheres’ argument is the exceptionalism it asserts, something that I take to be fatal to its own position as an implicit criticism of life – a criticism that requires a truth claim in its appeal – linking Dorian Gray to Zola in that they are both accusing their society of self-deception as regards the reality of sexual desire and its enactment in the social realm of child and other prostitutions, female sexuality, and homosexuality. If art is immune to the criticisms that it would level at others, then it can't level them. In the 1891 preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , Wilde asserts that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ 58 But of course that is not all, not because books are in any essential sense moral or immoral (again, Wilde is defending himself and his work against the standards of his time); rather, by referring to them as ‘well’ or ‘badly’ written he is obliging them to undergo evaluation and judgement in the light of something done, of actions undertaken, and if these are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, then they cannot exclude questions about the values that support those judgements, values that cannot be kept clear of the ethical, though not necessarily of ‘morals’ in its strictly period sense. Wilde's problem is that he can't have art as both a criticism of life and as something aloof from it, for to be aloof is to lay it open to standards of criticism that it would itself have to accept.

Wilde asserts: ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property to public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of every member of the community.’ 59 Danson responds: ‘Facts do not prove the truth of this proposition, any more than facts disprove the beauty of a lie.’ 60 But Wilde's sentence has value as an expression of belief in the triumph of better human qualities, and as such is a future-directed expression of aspiration. What the facts of human history, as narrated in assertions that gather evidence to them, can do, since they are past-directed in their subject matter and present-directed in their conclusions, is to point out that Wilde's belief has not yet been fully borne out in experience. And, what's more, facts can disprove the beauty of a lie: because that is what Wilde polemically called the moral ‘flaw’ which The Picture of Dorian Gray manifests by its conclusion: Dorian's beauty is a lie and, when that is revealed, he has to die.

What hindsight further reveals is that the value of Wilde's oeuvre and his example is inextricable from its truth to a range of experience that his society was only willing to contemplate in titillating, comically perverse glimpses. As a complexly adversarial artist with an urgent need to be commercially successful, Wilde's performance is a perpetual ‘revolt into style’, where the former involves a rejection of his society's idea of a conventional life, and the latter tries to reproduce it as a commodity performance, one which nevertheless attempts to preserve the frisson of the actual revolt in the ‘harmless’ parody of it. 61 Among Wilde's trials was his having his style stripped away, as symbolically for thirty minutes from two to half-past on the platform at Clapham Junction while being transferred to Reading on 21 November 1895, so that the revolt could be revealed and punished. He can be thought to have connived in his downfall, because it cashed out the meaning of his style in its revolt against the society in which he was compelled to perform and be consumed. This is why his concern was the truth of masks, not the truth of masks . The latter was his defence, but the former was his intent, and the Ballad also points out how constraining the obligation to don a mask can be. The warders cannot ask Wooldridge why ‘he was glad | The hangman's hand was near’, for each of them ‘Must set a lock upon his lips, | And make his face a mask’ (p. 201). 62

The honour that despises deceit represents a form of self-sufficiency; a capacity not to have to worry about the accommodations that deceit can secure. But the feeling that one must be open with others can itself be seen as a need, as expressing fear or indignity, and noble self-sufficiency may then take the form of defeating people's expectations, of being unhelpfully misleading or ironical, or deploying masks. The man who is for others, on this line of thought, is no-one in particular. A predominant emphasis on the motivations of a self-sufficient nobility in relation to Sincerity, and equally this style of reversing them, are most naturally rooted in hierarchical or aristocratic societies, or, again, in association with a very highly cultured aesthetic. (We may recall Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is the product of genuine feeling.) 63

Strictly speaking, the feeling, genuine or not, that prompted The Ballad of Reading Gaol is evanescent. What matters is whether in reading the poem we are convinced. The jury is likely to be out a long time on whether ‘genuine feeling’ helps or hinders art in being convincing. Williams's scenario nonetheless accounts for why Wilde was caught between ‘the accommodations that deceit can secure’ and the ‘self-sufficient nobility’ that would require him to dispense with them. In a further twist, what Henry James called Wilde's ‘drollery’, his ‘“cheeky” paradoxical wit’ could be ‘unhelpfully misleading or ironical’ and simultaneously the tacit expression of an independence from that need to deceive whose words would challenge his society to be more understanding of others than it then dared.

‘A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true’, Wilde further claimed. 64 His remark in ‘The Truth of Masks’ has at least two applications that make it less outrageous an assertion than might at first appear. The first and quite familiar, relevant to the Shakespeare who is the piece's main subject, and underlining the ‘ truth in art’, is that the drama arises from the interplay of assertions and counter-assertions which both have expressive and explanatory force, revealing through their conflicted workings out further truths to complex experience. The second, emphasising the ‘truth in art ’, is that the truth expressed in aesthetic values always needs to be argued for and provided with rational justification. The same arrangements of colour and form, sound and shape, can carry contradictory values depending on the purposes they are put to, and the arguments made regarding them. This is not ‘a matter of taste’, but what the artwork in its material existence can be understood to mean. It may thus be legitimately understood to express contradictory truths, with conflicting values, each of which can be appreciated in its logic even by those who prefer one or the other. The Importance of Being Earnest is simultaneously trivial and profound. The further truths it embodies partake of both.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol , if it is even in part what Yeats claims for it, must have truth-values beyond its local inaccuracies of fact and emphasis. Comparing himself with Trooper Wooldridge, Wilde concluded the second part of his poem with an acknowledgement of his being guilty as charged:

Needing to acknowledge the truths of the society that had condemned both murderer and homosexual, Wilde draws upon the language of established religion, and the truths that would be voiced by the prison chaplain, for instance, in assuming, as is still the case among many believers, that Wilde's sexual behaviour was against God's law. Yet the metaphor of the hunter's trap springing shut upon both of them tells another truth, one perhaps more apt for Wilde than Wooldridge, namely that it is criminalisation which defines the Sin, and the nature of legal decision-making that determines exactly the pains delivered as punishment by the jaws of the ‘gin’. Both inmates of Reading Gaol experienced this truth in that each could have had his sentence commuted, and neither did; however, the cases were different once more in that Wilde petitioned the Home Secretary for leniency while Wooldridge ‘often said that he was glad | The hangman's hands were near’ (p. 201) and asked, despite requests for clemency from both jury and people in Berkshire, specifically not to have his sentence reduced. 65 Hindsight helps us, then, when the ‘sins’ and the ‘crimes’ have at least partially been stripped away, to see why in the performance of his writings Wilde was obliged to exaggerate, to mislead, to make jokes, and wittily towards the final curtain for The Importance of Being Earnest to echo the oath taken by witnesses in court about what ‘a terrible thing’ it is ‘for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth’. 66

Henry James, A Life in Letters ed. Philip Horne (London 1999) p. 246.

To Edwin Laurence Godkin, 22 Jan. 1882, ibid., p. 135. Horne cites James employing the metaphor referring to ‘a cage of beasts at some infernal “Zoo”’ at the first night of Guy Domville in a letter to his brother William (p. 274).

For a carefully argued treatment of such retrospect, see Simon Dentith, Nineteenth-Century Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight (Farnham 2014).

James, A Life in Letters , p. 245.

Ibid., pp. 279–80.

Ibid., p. 287 (‘news of the pitiable Wilde … no capacity for resistance and recuperation … If he only had such a capacity, what a masterpiece he could still write!’). The translation is Philip Horne's. James reports Haldane's view of the situation. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London 1987) p. 456.

Ellmann, Oscar Wilde , p. 473, states this without citing the letter said to contain it.

Merchant of Venice , IV. i. 65–6.

Anne Varty points out the allusion in A Preface to Oscar Wilde (London 1998) p. 85.

Parenthetical page references in the text are to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , vol. i: Poems and Poems in Prose , ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford 2000).

See Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters , ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davies (London 2000) pp. 989^ff. for responses to the financial pressure on him not to see Alfred Douglas after his release.

Oscar Wilde, The Complete Plays , introd. H. Montgomery Hyde (London 1988) p. 85.

W. B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford 1936) p. vii. The anonymous 26 February 1898 review in Academy wished that from ‘the 109 stanzas we would indeed like to remove some fifty’. Karl Beckson (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London 1970) p. 212.

Wilde, Letters , p. 654. See also: ‘there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book’ (ibid., pp. 430–1).

Ibid., p. 916. See also ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills , one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity’: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , vol. iv: Criticism: Historical Criticism; Intentions; The Soul of Man , ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford 2007) pp. 199–200.

Yeats, ‘Introduction’, p. vi. Seamus Heaney is insightful on Yeats's cutting of Wilde's poem in ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London 1995) pp. 88–9.

See Wilde, Complete Works , i. 310.

See Anthony Stokes, Pit of Shames: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (Winchester 2007) p. 104. Wilde's self-parody may be apocryphal. Saint-John Perse wrote of the ‘vin bleu du quartier des matelots’ in Images à Crusoé (1904).

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , vol. ii: De Profundis; ‘Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’ , ed. Ian Small (Oxford 2005) p. 95.

Wilde: The Critical Heritage , pp. 215–6.

Wilde, Complete Works , ii. 95.

Wilde, Letters , p. 1003.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 223.

See ibid., p. 219, for Shakespeare's anachronism, and p. 223 for Hugo's error.

Ibid., p. 76. For inconsistencies and its magazine publication as ‘Shakespeare and Stage Costume’, see Lawrence Danson, Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford 1997) pp. 60^ff.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 220.

Ibid., p. 219.

See Christopher Ricks, ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’, in id., Essays in Appreciation (Oxford 1996) pp. 280–10, and my response in ‘Matters of Fact and Value’, Poetry, Poets, Readings: Making Things Happen (Oxford 2002) pp. 83–108.

Wilde, Letters , p. 987. See also p. 983.

Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (London 1987) p. 173.

Wilde: The Critical Heritage , p. 224.

See Ellmann Oscar Wilde , p. 473, for Wilde's reply to Douglas when asked what he meant by the famous line: ‘ You ought to know.’

Arthur Symons's phrase in his 1898 review; see Wilde: The Critical Heritage , p. 220.

See Danson, Wilde's Intentions , p. 144, citing James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) p. 164.

Wilde, Complete Plays , p. 112.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , vol. vi: Journalism Part 1 , ed. John Stokes and Mark M. Turner (Oxford 2013) p. 35.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 95.

Danson makes the point in Wilde's Intentions , p. 44.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 98. Vivian notes that the ‘actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people’.

For more on such compromised poems about prostitution, see my ‘The Poetry of Modern Life: On the Pavement’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Verse (Oxford 2013) pp. 254–72.

Wilde, Complete Works , vi. 36.

See Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington 1992), and especially ‘The Value of a Nocturne’, pp. 217–28, with the issue of whether ‘a fixed relation did exist between a picture's price and its intrinsic value’ aired on p. 219.

Cited in Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake (New Haven 2014) p. 158.

See letters to the journal Truth in early January 1890 in Wilde, Letters , pp. 418–20. In a further irony of hindsight, the editor of Truth was that same Henry Labouchère who had, five years earlier, introduced the amendment that would, five years later, lead to Wilde's imprisonment. I owe this point to Andrew Nash. See his ‘ Better Dead : J. M. Barrie's First Book and the Shilling Fiction Market’, Scottish Literary Review , 7/1 (Spring/Summer 2015) pp. 31–2.

Stokes annotates the ‘cricket cap’ and describes ‘Trial Men’ as prisoners ‘on remand’ and ‘presumed to be innocent’, subject to a ‘less harsh prison regime’: Pit of Shame , p. 105.

Danson, Wilde's Intentions , p. 9. Reading Wilde homosexually cannot have been so post facto or anachronistic. Early reviews of Dorian Gray allude to the Cleveland Street scandal. Wilde edited his novel between magazine and book publication with such readings in mind. I owe this, and other advice on this essay, to Peter Stoneley.

Danson, Wilde's Intentions , p. 29.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 147.

Wilde cannot have read Nietzsche's ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873). Though circulated in a fair copy, it was only posthumously published. However, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) may have reached Wilde's milieu.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 149.

Wilde, Letters , p. 430.

Prison officials in The Ballad of Reading Gaol can be identified and named, hence the fear of libel and Wilde's argument that his figures are generic abstractions, the colour of Governor Isaacson's complexion being not ‘yellow’ but ‘mulberry’. Wilde, Letters , p. 983.

T. S. Eliot adapted Wilde's ‘yellow fog’ that ‘came creeping down’ into the ‘yellow fog that rubs its back’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London 1963) p. 13.

Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr W. H: The Greatly Enlarged Version … , ed. Vyvyan Holland (London 1958) p. 3.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 , 2nd edn., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago 1979) p. 77e. ‘Ethik und Aesthetik sind Eins’ was written on 24 July 1916, and incorporated as 6.421 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

Danson, Wilde's Intentions , p. 137.

Ibid., p. 139.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , vol. iii: The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts , ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford 2005) p. 167.

Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man’, Complete Works , iv. 233.

Danson, Wilde's Intentions , p. 158.

Wilde was a ‘conformist rebel’ according to the subtitle of Norbert Kohl's 1989 study. T. S. Eliot had said of Tennyson that he was ‘the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist’ in ‘In Memoriam’: Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (London 1975) p. 246. Similar things might be said of all artists who wish to criticise their society and have their criticisms widely heard.

Symons underlined this in his review: ‘it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing left desirable in illusion’: Wilde: The Critical Heritage , p. 219.

Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton 2002) p. 116.

Wilde, Complete Works , iv. 228.

See Stokes, Pit of Shame , p. 75. Wooldridge did wear his blue uniform to his execution and is reported in the Reading Mercury as dying ‘bravely without a struggle or a cry … as if he were on parade’ (p. 89).

Wilde, The Complete Plays , p. 288.

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol

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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.

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. "

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 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

He does not sit with silent men   Who watch him night and day; Who watch him when he tries to weep,   And when he tries to pray; Who watch him lest himself should rob   The prison of its prey.

He does not 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 black,   With the yellow face of Doom.

He does not rise in piteous haste   To put on convict-clothes, While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes   Each new and nerve-twitched pose, Fingering a watch whose little ticks   Are like horrible hammer-blows.

He does not know that sickening thirst   That sands one's throat, before The hangman with his gardener's gloves   Slips through the padded door, And binds one with three leathern thongs,   That the throat may thirst no more.

He does not bend his head to hear   The Burial Office read, Nor, while the terror of his soul   Tells him he is not dead, Cross his own coffin, as he moves   Into the hideous shed.

He does not stare upon the air   Through a little roof of glass; He does not pray with lips of clay   For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek   The kiss of Caiaphas.

Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard,   In a suit of shabby grey: His 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 wandering cloud that trailed   Its raveled fleeces by.

He did not wring his hands, as do   Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope   In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun,   And drank the morning air.

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

And I and all the souls in pain,   Who tramped the other ring, Forgot if we ourselves had done   A great or little thing, And watched with gaze of dull amaze   The man who had to swing.

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

For oak and elm have pleasant leaves   That in the spring-time shoot: But grim to see is the gallows-tree,   With its adder-bitten root, And, green or dry, a man must die   Before it bears its fruit!

The loftiest place is that seat of grace   For which all worldlings try: But who would stand in hempen band   Upon a scaffold high, And through a murderer's collar take   His last look at the sky?

It is sweet to dance to violins   When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes   Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet   To dance upon the air!

So with curious eyes and sick surmise   We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us   Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell   His sightless soul may stray.

At last the dead man walked no more   Amongst the Trial Men, And I knew that he was standing up   In the black dock's dreadful pen, And that never would I see his face   In God's sweet world again.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm   We had crossed each other's way: But we made no sign, we said no word,   We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night,   But in the shameful day.

A prison wall was round us both,   Two outcast men were we: The world had thrust us from its heart,   And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin   Had caught us in its snare.

In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,   And the dripping wall is high, So it was there he took the air   Beneath the leaden sky, And by each side a Warder walked,   For fear the man might die.

Or else he sat with those who watched   His anguish night and day; Who watched him when he rose to weep,   And when he crouched to pray; Who watched him lest himself should rob   Their scaffold of its prey.

The Governor was strong upon   The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but   A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called   And left a little tract.

And twice a day he smoked his pipe,   And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held   No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad   The hangman's hands were near.

But why he said so strange a thing   No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher's doom   Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips,   And make his face a mask.

Or else he might be moved, and try   To comfort or console: And what should Human Pity do   Pent up in Murderers' Hole? What word of grace in such a place   Could help a brother's soul?

With slouch and swing around the ring   We trod the Fool's Parade! We did not care: we knew we were   The Devil's Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead   Make a merry masquerade.

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.

So still it lay that every day   Crawled like a weed-clogged wave: And we forgot the bitter lot   That waits for fool and knave , Till once, as we tramped in from work,   We passed an open grave.

With yawning mouth the yellow hole   Gaped for a living thing; The very mud cried out for blood   To the thirsty asphalte ring: And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair   Some prisoner had to swing.

Right in we went, with soul intent   On Death and Dread and Doom: The hangman, with his little bag,   Went shuffling through the gloom And each man trembled as he crept   Into his numbered tomb.

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

He lay as one who lies and dreams   In a pleasant meadow-land, The watcher watched him as he slept,   And could not understand How one could sleep so sweet a sleep   With a hangman close at hand?

But there is no sleep when men must weep   Who never yet have wept: So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—   That endless vigil kept, And through each brain on hands of pain   Another's terror crept.

Alas! it is a fearful thing   To feel another's guilt! For, right within, the sword of Sin   Pierced to its poisoned hilt, And as molten lead were the tears we shed   For the blood we had not spilt.

The Warders with their shoes of felt   Crept by each padlocked door, And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,   Grey figures on the floor, And wondered why men knelt to pray   Who never prayed before.

All through the night we knelt and prayed,   Mad mourners of a corpse! The troubled plumes of midnight were   The plumes upon a hearse: And bitter wine upon a sponge   Was the savior of Remorse.

The cock crew, the red cock crew,   But never came the day: And crooked shape of Terror crouched,   In the corners where we lay: And each evil sprite that walks by night   Before us seemed to play.

They glided past, they glided fast,   Like travelers through a mist: They mocked the moon in a rigadoon   Of delicate turn and twist, And with formal pace and loathsome grace   The phantoms kept their tryst.

With mop and mow, we saw them go,   Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout   They trod a saraband: And the damned grotesques made arabesques,   Like the wind upon the sand!

With the pirouettes of marionettes,   They tripped on pointed tread: But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,   As their grisly masque they led, And loud they sang, and loud they sang,   For they sang to wake the dead.

"Oho!" they cried, "The world is wide,   But fettered limbs go lame! And once, or twice, to throw the dice   Is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin   In the secret House of Shame."

No things of air these antics were   That frolicked with such glee: To men whose lives were held in gyves,   And whose feet might not go free, Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things,   Most terrible to see.

Around, around, they waltzed and wound;   Some wheeled in smirking pairs: With the mincing step of demirep   Some sidled up the stairs: And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,   Each helped us at our prayers.

The morning wind began to moan,   But still the night went on: Through its giant loom the web of gloom   Crept till each thread was spun: And, as we prayed, we grew afraid   Of the Justice of the Sun.

The moaning wind went wandering round   The weeping prison-wall: Till like a wheel of turning-steel   We felt the minutes crawl: O moaning wind! what had we done   To have such a seneschal?

At last I saw the shadowed bars   Like a lattice wrought in lead, Move right across the whitewashed wall   That faced my three-plank bed, And I knew that somewhere in the world   God's dreadful dawn was red.

At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,   At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing   The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath   Had entered in to kill.

He did not pass in purple pomp,   Nor ride a moon-white steed. Three yards of cord and a sliding board   Are all the gallows' need: So with rope of shame the Herald came   To do the secret deed.

We were as men who through a fen   Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer,   Or give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us,   And what was dead was Hope.

For Man's grim Justice goes its way,   And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong,   It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong,   The monstrous parricide!

We waited for the stroke of eight:   Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate   That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose   For the best man and the worst.

We had no other thing to do,   Save to wait for the sign to com e: So, like things of stone in a valley lone,   Quiet we sat and dumb: But each man's heart beat thick and quick   Like a madman on a drum!

With sudden shock the prison-clock   Smote on the shivering air, And from all the gaol rose up a wail   Of impotent despair, Like the sound that frightened marshes hear   From a leper in his lair.

And as one sees most fearful things   In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope   Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer the hangman's snare   Strangled into a scream.

And all the woe that moved him so   That he gave that bitter cry, And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,   None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one   More deaths than one must die.

There is no chapel on the day   On which they hang a man: The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,   Or his face is far too wan, Or there is that written in his eyes   Which none should look upon.

So they kept us close till nigh on noon,   And then they rang the bell, And the Warders with their jingling keys   Opened each listening cell, And down the iron stair we tramped,   Each from his separate Hell.

Out into God's sweet air we went,   But not in wonted way, For this man's face was white with fear,   And that man's face was grey, And I never saw sad men who looked   So wistfully at the day.

I never saw sad men who looked   With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue   We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed   In happy freedom by.

But there were those amongst us all   Who walked with downcast head, And knew that, had each got his due,   They should have died instead: He had but killed a thing that lived   Whilst they had killed the dead.

For he who sins a second time   Wakes a dead soul to pain, And draws it from its spotted shroud,   And makes it bleed again, And makes it bleed great gouts of blood   And makes it bleed in vain!

Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb   With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round   The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round,   And no man spoke a word.

Silently we went round and round,   And through each hollow mind The memory of dreadful things   Rushed like a dreadful wind, And Horror stalked before each man,   And terror crept behind.

The Warders strutted up and down,   And kept their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span,   And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at   By the quicklime on their boots.

For where a grave had opened wide,   There was no grave at all: Only a stretch of mud and sand   By the hideous prison-wall, And a little heap of burning lime,   That the man should have his pall.

For he has a pall, this wretched man,   Such as few men can claim: Deep down below a prison-yard,   Naked for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot,   Wrapt in a sheet of flame!

And all the while the burning lime   Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night,   And the soft flesh by the day, It eats the flesh and bones by turns,   But it eats the heart alway.

For three long years they will not sow   Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot   Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky   With unreproachful stare.

They think a murderer's heart would taint   Each simple seed they sow. It is not true! God's kindly earth   Is kindlier than men know, And the red rose would but blow more red,   The white rose whiter blow.

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!   Out of his heart a white! For who can say by what strange way,   Christ brings his will to light, Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore   Bloomed in the great Pope's sight?

But neither milk-white rose nor red   May bloom in prison air; The shard, the pebble, and the flint,   Are what they give us there: For flowers have been known to heal   A common man's despair.

So never will wine-red rose or white,   Petal by petal, fall On that stretch of mud and sand that lies   By the hideous prison-wall, To tell the men who tramp the yard <7nbsp; That God's Son died for all.

Yet though the hideous prison-wall   Still hems him round and round, And a spirit man not walk by night   That is with fetters bound, And a spirit may not weep that lies   In such unholy ground,

He is at peace—this wretched man—   At peace, or will be soon: There is no thing to make him mad,   Nor does Terror walk at noon, For the lampless Earth in which he lies   Has neither Sun nor Moon.

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:   They did not even toll A reguiem that might have brought   Rest to his startled soul, But hurriedly they took him out,   And hid him in a hole.

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,   And gave him to the flies; They mocked the swollen purple throat   And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud   In which their convict lies.

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray   By his dishonored grave: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross   That Christ for sinners gave, Because the man was one of those   Whom Christ came down to save.

Yet all is well; he has but passed   To Life's appointed bourne: And alien tears will fill for him   Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourner will be outcast men,   And outcasts always mourn.

I know not whether Laws be right,   Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol   Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year,   A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law   That men have made for Man, Since first Man took his brother's life,   And the sad world began, But straws the wheat and saves the chaff   With a most evil fan.

This too I know—and wise it were   If each could know the same— That every prison that men build   Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see   How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,   And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell,   For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man   Ever should look upon!

The vilest deeds like poison weeds   Bloom well in prison-air: It is only what is good in Man   That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,   And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child   Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,   And gibe the old and grey, And some grow mad, and all grow bad,   And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell   Is foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death   Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust   In Humanity's machine.

The brackish water that we drink   Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales   Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks   Wild-eyed and cries to Time.

But though lean Hunger and green Thirst   Like asp with adder fight, We have little care of prison fare,   For what chills and kills outright Is that every stone one lifts by day   Becomes one's heart by night.

With midnight always in one's heart,   And twilight in one's cell, We turn the crank, or tear the rope,   Each in his separate Hell, And the silence is more awful far   Than the sound of a brazen bell.

And never a human voice comes near   To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door   Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot,   With soul and body marred.

And thus we rust Life's iron chain   Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep,   And some men make no moan: But God's eternal Laws are kind   And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,   In prison-cell or yard, Is as that broken box that gave   Its treasure to the Lord, And filled the unclean leper's house   With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break   And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan   And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart   May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat.   And the stark and staring eyes, Waits for the holy hands that took   The Thief to Paradise; And a broken and a contrite heart   The Lord will not despise.

The man in red who reads the Law   Gave him three weeks of life, Three little weeks in which to heal   His soul of his soul's strife, And cleanse from every blot of blood   The hand that held the knife.

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,   The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood,   And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain   Became Christ's snow-white seal.

In Reading gaol by Reading town   There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man   Eaten by teeth of flame, In burning winding-sheet he lies,   And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,   In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear,   Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved,   And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,   By all 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!

This poem is in the public domain.

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol

The ballad of reading gaol lyrics.

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• Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
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“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is a 109-stanza poem composed while Wilde was in exile in France; after his release from prison in Reading, Berkshire, England, where he had been incarcerated for two years after being convicted of homosexual offenses in 1895.

Wilde’s purpose was a critique of the cruelty of the system and the degrading nature of incarceration at the time, which undermined rather than promoted remorse and rehabilitation.

It is worth noting that, although homosexuality is legal in many countriesl now and more accepted in society than in Wilde’s time, many of his lovers were underage boys, and he would today be convicted of paedophilia. The justification or otherwise of Wilde’s punishment is not a matter on which he chose to write.

What he does focus on is the paradox of the suffering and pain of the prisoners, while observing a ‘happier’ man, named Wooldridge, on death row. The message and setting of the poem are clear, unlike his other surreal poems with extreme metaphors.

This was known to be his last (and only successful) poem, with a totally different style compared to his other works. As he wrote in a letter:

It is a new style for me, full of actuality in life in its directness of message and meaning.“ A ballad is a traditional song or poem which tells a story of an ordinary person, and suits the subject matter Wilde has chosen.

This was Wilde’s last work before passing away in November 30, 1900.

Structure The 109 six-line stanzas are in ballad style, usually four-lined stanzas or quatrains, but Wilde chose six-lined stanzas. He follows the traditional structure of iambic tetrameters , that is four metrical feet per line, alternating with iambic trimeters , that is three metrical feet per line. A iamb is a metrical foot made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. The rhyme scheme is regular ABCBDB. The effect is rhythmic and song-like.

The ballad is grouped into six parts. Each section is characterised by a different approaches, but with important links. Part 1 consists of 16 stanzas, which deal with the history; a prisoner murdered the woman he loved and was sentenced to death. It first focuses on the prisoner, and then takes a wider perspective, reflecting on men who kill ‘the thing they love’. However, not all die as a result. A description of the terrible prison conditions ends the section.

Part II consists of 13 stanzas, the first six dealing with the condemned man and the rest deal with the fears of the prisoners, who are badly affected by his fate. Life ‘outside’, where free people live, love and dance, is contrasted to life ‘inside’ the prison where prisoners sit out their sentence indifferently and pass each other without communicating

Part III is the longest with 37 stanzas. The first twelve describe how the prisoners see the condemned man for the last time. The next six stanzas focus on evening and nightfall. 19 stanzas then deal with the fellow prisoners’ identification with Wooldridge on the night preceding his execution, when they have terrible dreams. This draws out their common humanity. The section closes with a vision of the execution.

Part IV This shows how the dead man’s punishment extends after death, beginning with the next morning. Wilde then focuses on the warders and the grave of burning lime. In the last 12 stanzas the corpse is buried in a hurry without a final prayer or a cross to mark the place. The destruction of the prisoner after death shows the inhumanity of man to man, but this only strengthens their solidarity.

Part V is concerned with the abstract problem of collective human and social guilt and starts off with a critique of the penal system. The goal of rehabilitation of the inmates is a impossible, as life only exists outside the prison.

Part VI , finally, concludes the ballad in its three verses by once more taking up the theme that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’,repeating word for word the related verse in Part I.

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

Anaphora : many instance of repetition of the words “Nor”, “Some” among lines.

Refrain : Variations of “For each man kills the thing he loves, / Yet each man does not die.” show up a few times throughout the poem.

ABCBDB rhyme pattern

Biblical imagery: many covert biblical references throughout the poem

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol Essays

Alas- moralism and conflicting ideas in helas and the ballad of reading gaol anonymous 12th grade, the ballad of reading gaol.

Oscar Wilde hails from the Victorian generation, a set of writers known for its dogmas and oppression. In many of his works, he negates these austere ideas with his own particular brand of humour; however, Helas! and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are...