The Ballad of Reading Gaol [poem]

And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock’s dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
For weal or woe 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.

I started this poem in the deepest, most surreal time I have ever felt in my life. It was a Friday, a regular school day I decided to ditch last minute in a half meaningful attempt to make sense of something again. I think I just show more wanted the world to stop, in retrospect, but I took any feeling I had as a sign, and so my floundering at my bookshelf for something to make myself feel better seemed a better use of my time than pretending to focus on any kind of academics.

It had been two days since a close friend of mine took his life. We had been friends for 5 years, and through mourning I came to regret an aspect in our friendship that had grown closely in the year preceding– sickly growing. Depression and queerness was a staple of our relationship, a mutual need of validation for both, a trusted friend to rely on when both seemed to get too much. It was he who I could only be candid with about death, the stupid musings of that which now felt minuscule compared to what I felt now, and so his forced absence from my life only heightened the sick reality we had spoken about to one another.

And with it, I felt I had let him down. This is the process of mourning you will tell me, and I know, but that feeling of those doomed ships in the night passing without a word, a word of real value to preserve either our lives, felt more poignant than I could ever describe. Depression (perhaps even our queerness, which I believe in part took him from us) was that shameful day, that reality we neither believed in full focus, and I lamented that clarity he left behind in me now. If's run rife in sudden death, for God know's what would be in our holy night, but I like to believe better judgment, and a call for help. It was not supposed to happen. I forget how lucky I am to be alive right now.

My friend was gone, and I did not know where. In the black dock’s dreadful pen? I could not feel him after his death. I hoped he was. I searched the poem over a couch in a coffee shop, sipping some bitter coffee I hadn't really a taste for, trying to break the fast that had consumed me since Wednesday morning. I was delirious: my head was feverish, I hadn't drunk water in days, and already I felt the 5 pounds that I lost start to bite me in the ribs. I was struck by how fast the body deteriorated when you willed it to. I got heady with it; I wanted to stop eating until he was buried, and through this stupid haze the only thing I allowed myself to do in earnest was to focus on this damned poem. I still don't know where he is.

My mind allowed me to do very little, except to know that I was very hungry, that my constant nosebleeds were probably from my lack of drinking any water, and that I would never look upon my friend's face again. With only that reality turning in my mind, a gross emptiness would rise in me, and the little my mind could do in its present state was reduced to a few strings of deep remorse. The variety of perversity in normal things Oscar found in prison was true. For weal or woe again? A small comfort. Pain does not make sense. Sorrow is a baseless act.

The question of queerness interwove throughout the poem as well, and I found myself taking it in like a half-wanted hand over eyes at a horror film– a sort of lamented dialogue follows Oscar's words to other queer people: as a forewarning– as remorse– as unequivocal fate? I could not help but feel his uncertainty in that as well. There was one certainty, though, and that was that Oscar felt his sexuality to be a reason for his end:

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.

Where was God in this? Had the stamp of our desires not doomed us from the start? I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, put there from the weight of the world. Oscar had felt like God had abandoned him, and that his hedonism could be pursued without punishment. Perhaps an outdated thought to you, but spirituality is in most of us. To see a struggle of God and sexuality was to see yet another struggle we must endure, and the unmistakable heaviness from a world not made for us weighed me down, of our wants and the desires too often altered in the hands of the ones in power. It seemed sick that the world had done this. Amelioration from depression is possible: a need for a reprieve from a part of your being? Deliriously unnecessary. I looked at Oscar's struggle, and I was happy to have a voice that penned my own feeling's so much better. But the question of my friend's and I's queerness in this world would remain unanswered.

And so it has been 3 weeks since I have had to start to relearn what it means to be alive, and while The Ballad of Reading Gaol offered few answers, it did lessen the pain. There is comfort in validity, and hearing another so broken and lost put into words the senselessness of a preventable death calmed me. I no longer felt so dreadfully alone. I am still very confused (just as I found Oscar was as well) and I have just laid a few stones of the spiritual rebuild I know will take years to build back up, but in that fresh wound of grief, I commend Oscar for his words. I once believed words could heal all, and though I don't know if I believe that anymore, he gives me hope I can one day come back to that conclusion. A fine read. I will remember this poem forever. show less

Oscar Wilde’s final poem is famously connected to his time spent in Reading Gaol in 1896, where he served two years for “gross indecency with men.” Fully aware of the penalties for homosexuality in 1890s England, Wilde married and had two sons. But in 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young British poet and aristocrat 16 years his junior.
Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was outraged by the relationship and sought to expose Wilde. Wilde reacted by filing a libel suit against the Marquess and it was from this action that his own trial and conviction sprang.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is more than an indictment of the system which sent Wilde to jail, however. It is a treatise on what it is to show more suffer incarceration, the inadequacies of both the society and its religious arm to forgive or sympathize with the incarcerated, and the hopelessness of love to save any man from suffering.

Its most famous lines:

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.

say a great deal about both the feelings of betrayal Wilde was experiencing and his recognition that the betrayal was worse than the punishment coldly inflicted by the judicial system.

There are serious religious overtones to the poem, in which many references to the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ are referenced. In the above stanza, one cannot help immediately conjuring the kiss of Judas.

Since the major premise of the poem is that of a man convicted of murder and being hanged, it is ironic to see Wilde tie the murder to love and passion; the punishment to a complete lack of feeling or understanding of humanity. It is the prisoners, themselves, who fall on their knees in prayer for the soul of this man, it is the other sinners who plead with God for his intercession; for the righteous, or those who set themselves up to be so, cannot feel the pain on any level at all. Even the priest is just a man who hands out tracts. He is happy to lay the corpse and move on.

The dehumanizing of the imprisoned is so complete that even after they are dead they are denied the comfort of flowers on their graves. In fact, the true purpose of the denial is so that no other prisoner might see the flowers blooming and take hope from the fact that beauty, or perhaps forgiveness, exists. There is to be no hope, for this is meant to erase the humanity of the men; so that the lucky man is the one executed and killed only once, as those who are held are erased, spiritually killed, daily. show less

Ballad of Reading Gaol - Oscar Wilde  I don't read a lot of poetry as such because my favorites rhyme and are silly; so nothing since Old Possum really. (In my defense, I pay a lot of attention to song lyrics, and enjoy a slant rhyme or an unusual rhythm, otherwise, as you may have noticed, I read a lot of children's books which meet both my criteria but aren't usually labeled "poetry"). I honestly can't remember if I read this in its entirety back in the day: there were a lot of English literature classes, and a lot of reading, only a small portion of which actually stuck, although I can usually guess the age and author within a hundred years or so, so, you know, I learned context, and that's something, right? (Please Mr. Edwards, show more don't feel that your teaching was in vain.)
Whatever got me thinking about Wilde got me reading up on him in Wikipedia, and got me wondering about the validity of Ellman's biography (which I dearly loved, but it's been more than 20 years, so it is a bit vague now) and from one thing to another down the rabbit hole until I read the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Despite it's complete lack of silliness I quite enjoyed it, and found it very moving. But the real shocker was how many of its lines I had seen quoted, without recognizing the source before. Woah.
Wilde was foolish to file the suit, but damn, no one deserves what he endured (he and others, so many others) for love.
personal copy
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From personal experience, Oscar Wilde writes his final work. While imprisoned at Reading jail for his homosexual acts, he witnesses a man executed for killing his wife. Thus he writes
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!
This poem is even sadder after reading about the circumstances in which it was written.

This is definitely not the Wilde many people are familiar with- here he eschews the characteristic wit in favour of a sorrowful, dark lament about prison life and the concept of prison in general. This poem isn't in the vein of some of Wilde's more well-known works and honestly, it's all the better for it.

Read the poem here and read more about Wilde's time in prison here.

I could hear the rhythmic & repetitive tread of the prisoners in the yard in the cadence of the lines of the poems. Moving. Especially enhanced by the pictures in the edition I read, by Latimer J. Wilson.

And you know how titles are often drawn from poetry, the Bible, etc.? Why has nobody written a novel titled "The Blue Tent of Sky" after the line "that little tent of blue. Which prisoners call the sky...?"

What a beautiful poem. This is not a genre I read much, but I chose it to stretch me a little in my reading this year. The poem begs to be read out loud, and the repetitive structure provides an interesting frame for the changing focus of the ballad. I found it meaningful and beautiful, though it focuses on difficult subject matter. It's easy to see why this is considered a classic.