The Ballad of Reading Gaol (English
word for jail) is not the work that Oscar Wilde wrote while imprisoned for
moral (in his case, homosexual) offences in 1895; that work was De Profundis, published five years after
his death, in 1905.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol was
written after his release and in France, in 1897; it was first published in 1898, simply under his prisoner identification number, C.3-3.
The
poem was written in memory of Royal
House Guards trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge who
died in Reading prison in July 1896 and it traces the feelings of an imprisoned
man towards a fellow inmate who is to be hanged . They are "like two doomed ships that pass in storm", and Oscar Wilde
creates a solemn tone in his rhyme made sad and familiar by certain repeated
phrases "each man kills the thing he
loves", "the little tent of
blue/ Which prisoners call the sky.” The narrator’s emotions are filtered
through an uncertainty about the law that has condemned them, although he is
certain that they are joined together in sin.
While Oscar Wilde is focusing on the story of the
execution of the soldier for the brutal
murder of his lover, he is also meditating on injustice, betrayal, and the need
for prison reform – the
ballad is a condemnation of the death penalty and the whole penal system in Victorian England,
but it is much more than a
protest poem. It is a powerful
accusation of social hypocrisy which
condemns some individuals, but does not
deal with the violence and despair that underlie many people’s lives - only the weak are punished for their crimes.
To denounce the indifference of the law to man's anguish, the poet chooses as his subject the outcast among the outcasts, the prisoner who has inexplicably killed "the thing he loved" - this human being is the symbol of the universality of guilt and moral weakness as well as of the criminal, the outcast, the artist.
To denounce the indifference of the law to man's anguish, the poet chooses as his subject the outcast among the outcasts, the prisoner who has inexplicably killed "the thing he loved" - this human being is the symbol of the universality of guilt and moral weakness as well as of the criminal, the outcast, the artist.
Here you can read the whole poem.
Read here a very interesting article.
Now you can download a detailed analysis of the ballad and a worksheet about the first part of the poem.
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