But the central charge of the Ballad is sympathy, sympathy with the condemned man and his fellow inmates. One tiny revision tells us a lot. The last two lines of stanza 41 originally read: Sympathy enables Wilde to remember vivid details and evoke collective feelings. The poem's hellish truthfulness raises it beyond its occasional rhetorical flaws, its purple passages. Suffering is not guaranteed to produce great art, or great humanity.
However, there is no doubt that Wilde, the self-dubbed "lord of language", turns his awful humiliation to triumph in the Ballad, and attains a new poetic and moral stature. There's only room for a short extract, but you can read the whole poem here:. With slouch and swing around the ring We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: 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 horrid hole Gaped for a living thing; The very mud cried out for blood To the thirsty asphalt ring: On 23 November he was again moved, to the prison at Reading, which also had similar rules, where he spent the remainder of his sentence, and was assigned the third cell on the third floor of C ward—and thereafter addressed and identified only as "C.
Prisoners were identified only by their cell numbers and not by name. Wilde was released from prison on 18 May and he promptly went to France, never returning to Britain. He died in Paris, at the age of 46, on 30 November While in France, surviving on an allowance from his wife of three pounds a week—deliberately meagre to discourage the sort of high living that had led to his downfall—Wilde endeavoured to find additional money. In August , he sent the publisher Leonard Smithers an initial draft of the Ballad, which made such an impression that Smithers was enthusiastic about publishing it and even approached Aubrey Beardsley to do an illustration for it which was not done.
Thereafter there was a very active correspondence between the two of them, as Wilde was repeatedly revising and expanding the text, and supervising from afar the choice and size of typeface and the layout of the work. However, even the printing house hired to do the book demanded a change—for fear that the prison doctor would sue over the line which originally read "While the coarse-mouthed doctor gloats", it was changed to "While some coarse-mouthed doctor gloats".
As one biographer, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby , said, "Never, perhaps, since Gray 's Elegy had a poem been so revised, pruned, and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell". Originally the first edition—with no assurance of a second edition—was planned for only copies, but when Wilde calculated the printing expenses, he realised that even selling all would not cover costs, and at his instigation Smithers instructed the printing house to double the number of copies and keep the printing plates in hopes of a reprinting.
As publication day approached, Wilde was occasionally seized by a sort of panic over his finances and the risks of the poem failing to sell well, and made some half-hearted efforts to sell the poem's copyright for immediate cash; there were only a few disappointing nibbles and no such sale was made. Fortunately, the poem sold very well and very quickly, and caused such a stir that subsequent printings also sold well for more than a year, assuring Wilde of a steady income which he did not outlive, as he died less than four years after the Ballad first appeared.
It has been suggested [14] that Wilde was, to some degree, inspired by poem IX in A. Housman 's A Shropshire Lad , which alludes to the hanging of condemned prisoners:. They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: Although there is no specific documentation to show Wilde's active revising after the appearance of the first edition, there were some slight changes made in the second edition, which was printed only two weeks after the first edition went on sale.
For example, in the first edition a line read "And his step was light", and in the second edition it becomes "And his step seemed light". These tiny alterations persisted through the seventh edition, the last edition handled by Smithers, and thereafter to most of the reprints. Wilde did acknowledge evidently to several people, since numerous separate sources recalled this a glaring error in the very first line of the poem, "He did not wear his scarlet coat"—because Wooldridge, as a member of the Royal Horse Guards, had a blue uniform—but justified this poetic licence because the second line would make no sense if it said "For blood and wine are blue ".
The line is a nod to Shakespeare 's The Merchant of Venice , when Bassanio asks "Do all men kill the things they do not love? A passage from the poem was chosen as the epitaph on Wilde's tomb ;. The futility of life and love that dawned on him during his prison years are clearly reflected in the ballad, he repeatedly pictures himself and the inmates as the cast outs who are thrown out by the society, condemned and damned.
It is heartbreaking to see a man as lively and intelligent as Wilde ending up the way he did. There is so much pain in these lines, that to feel indifferent to his suffering is beyond ones control. Oct 16, Magdalen rated it it was amazing Shelves: 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!
Oscar Wilde will never cease to impress me. This poem in one word is a masterpiece. Oscar was a genius. Jun 25, Jaya rated it it was amazing Recommended to Jaya by: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die Not a person who finds appeal in a poems often. But this, this is something else.
This is the song of desolation of a man condemned. This is what I listened to immediately after I finished reading it Read by Rupert Everett, read to the prisoners of the Reading Prison, where Wilde was incarcerated and the very place he wrote this poem. View all 3 comments.
Apr 11, Duane rated it really liked it Shelves: The list of writers from the Victorian Era features some of the greatest of all time. But the most interesting of the lot for me would be Oscar Wilde, the one I would most like to meet if I could.
Introduction. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of The Ballad of Reading Gaol study guide contains a biography of Oscar Wilde, literature. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, .. Jump up ^ from various biographies of Oscar Wilde, most notably H. Montgoemery Hyde (), Richard Ellman (), Frank Harris ( ), Stuart.
What a brilliant writer. He wrote novels, plays, and poetry, and did it with a wit and style that is uniquely his own. But this poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was one of his best works. It is haunting, and moving, and sa The list of writers from the Victorian Era features some of the greatest of all time. It is haunting, and moving, and sad, and it is so different from what we come to expect from him. But he wrote this from personal experience, and you can feel his individual pain, and sorrow, and fear within the lines of the poem.
Jun 01, Oziel Bispo rated it really liked it. May 28, Nihan E.
Dec 22, Huda Aweys rated it liked it Shelves: It was a great poem , I like it: This is a link to read it http: 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! 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. Some do the deed with ma It was a great poem , I like it: 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.
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: Sep 11, Mariana Orantes rated it it was amazing. De nuevo me fallan tus lectores, goodreads. En general resuelve muy bien varios problemas de tradu De nuevo me fallan tus lectores, goodreads. I love, love, love this poem.
I love, love, love this edition early s, leather-bound. I love, love, love the fact that Oscar Wilde wrote this cry from a prison cell. Yes, I love this work of art. Nor does Terror walk at noon The subject of the poem was guilty, admitting to the police that he had killed his wife. The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.
I know I just talked about Wilde's poems but this one over here is on an entirely different level. Would give it ten stars if I could. It is an absolute masterpiece, he is an absolute masterpiece, made me shed some tears here and there that might be because I truly love the man with a burning passion but never-mind that , raised every hair on my skin. So a little bit of context for those who might need it: Oscar Wilde, "glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or Ahhhhhhhhh!!!
Oscar Wilde, "glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet", creds to the blurb wrote this poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" Reading Gaol, UK, was the prison in which Wilde stayed during his two year sentence, convicted for his homosexuality , about the execution of another inmate. It consists of stanzas, in case anyone if anyone is reading this at all was wondering. I don't want to give too much away so I'll stop there. Read it for yourselves! The poem, in essence, is a very Wilde ride.
I'll just jump straight to the extracts shocker!
Keep in mind that quotes are much nicer when you read them within the text and often lose substance when ripped out of their context. Of course I'll leave some out, or else I'd be spoiling the poem for everyone. The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. Thank you Oscar, you bring music to my soul.
Oh god, how cheesy. It actually reminds me of another excerpt, from a different poem of his. It's from "To L. L" Lillie Langtry, a friend of his and it goes: I'm not usually this sappy but I'm not used to all the emotions your words make me feel and the way they resonate within me either! Ahora toca seguir y descubrir cosas nuevas.
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: Edwards, don't feel that your teaching was in vain.