The ballad of Reading Gaol

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The ballad of Reading Gaol

• Oscar Wilde

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Brief Biography

• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) first rose to prominence
  at Oxford University, where he founded the
  Aesthetic Movement which promoted art for arts
  sake and was notorious for his colourful style
  of dress. His major successes were on the London
  stage, with a number of highly accomplished,
  witty plays which undermined social conventions,
  culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest.
• His life ended bitterly. He was convicted for
  homosexual practices and sentenced to
  imprisonment. After his release, he lived his
  last years in Paris under a pseudonym. The Ballad
  of Reading Gaol was written at this time.
• The finished poem was published in 1898 under the
  name C.3.3., which stood for cell block C,
  landing 3, cell 3. This ensured that Wilde's name
  by then notorious did not appear on the
  poem's front cover. It was not commonly known,
  until June 1899, that C.3.3. was actually Wilde.

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The ballad of Reading Gaol

• He did not wear his scarlet coat, For
  blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were
  on his hands When they found him with the
  dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And
  murdered in her bed.He walked amongst the Trial
  Men In a suit of shabby grey A cricket cap was
  on his head, And his step seemed light and
  gay But I never saw a man who looked So
  wistfully at the day.

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• 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.

• 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."

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• 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

• 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.

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Summary

• This excerpt comprises of the first ten stanzas
  of Wildes much longer poem The Ballad of
  Reading Gaol (gaol is pronounced jail). He was
  inspired to write the poem by the execution of a
  fellow inmate for the brutal murder of his wife.
  However, the poem also is an attack on the
  injustice and hypocrisy of Victorian Society. It
  also has a political undercurrent, appealing for
  prison reform.

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Summary contd

• The excerpt concentrates on the condemned man
  (Charles Thomas Wooldridge), whom the persona
  (the voice speaking in the poem) never meets but
  observes during exercise period, eyeing the sky
  wistfully. Wilde quickly shifts to presenting the
  impact on the persona, who reacts to the news
  that the convict is to be executed. He then
  meditates on the wider implications of guilt
  each man is guilty of a crimekilling the thing
  he lovesbut is not held accountable. The persona
  then resumes his account of the plight of the
  condemned man, execution.

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Questions on structure and language

1. What rhythm does Wilde use in this poem?
2. Find examples of internal rhyme in the poem?
   What might these rhymes represent?
3. The rhythm, rhyme and simple vocabulary or stanza
   8 create an almost nursery rhyme effect? Why
   does Wilde do this?
4. One stanza contains lots of different examples of
   alliteration. Which one is it and why does Wilde
   do this here?
5. Two consecutive stanzas contains a number of
   examples of imagery. Why are they used at this
   particular point?
6. What is the purpose of the exclamation in stanza
   5?
7. Stanzas 7, 8 and 9 use a great deal of antitheses
   (opposites). Why does Wilde do this?
8. Where and why does Wilde use repetition in this
   extract?
9. There is a great deal of negative diction in
   stanza ten. What is the effect of this?
10. Why do you think Wilde describes the execution in
    such detail in stanza ten?

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Structure

• Although the poem is labelled a ballad, Wilde
  did not adhere to the traditional, four-line
  ballad stanza (with the second and fourth lines
  rhyming) but adopted a six-line stanza instead.
  Wilde also used iambic tetrameter (four
  repetitions of the iambic pattern of stress on
  the second syllable) rather than the five
  repetitions popular in English poetry (iambic
  pentameter). Internal rhyme is also frequently
  used.

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Language

• The poem begins with a lot of emotive language,
  poor dead woman and murdered which sets a
  rather melodramatic tone and establishes the
  personas voice. The second stanza describes the
  dead man as he walks around the trial yard at
  the prison. His step seemed light and gay, but
  the prisoner was described as looking wistfully
  at the day. This contrast shows the prisoners
  dilemma, he is under a death sentence.

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Language

• In the third stanza, the persona observes the
  condemned man looking at the sky A little tent
  of blue with and the clouds passing With sails
  of silver. This imagery sums up the beauty of
  the natural world and the condemned mans wish to
  remain alive. Which is contrasted by societys
  voice in stanza 4 proclaiming That fellow's got
  to swing. This is perhaps Wildes most poignant
  plea, for us to pause before we condemn others,
  as Wilde was condemned for his homosexuality. In
  stanza 5, Wilde uses a simile to show his
  sympathy with the condemned man, The sky above
  my head became Like a casque of scorching steel

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Language

• He goes on to say that everyone in some way is
  responsible for destroying what they love Each
  man kills the thing he loves . He then lists the
  variety of ways men and women hurt each other
  Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a
  flattering word.
• Although we may not all be murderers, we have all
  hurt the people we love, just as the condemned
  prisoner does, so Wilde is asking why was there
  so little mercy for him in Victorian society?

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Language

• The final stanzas of the excerpt use antithesis
  to show the myriad of ways that people hurt and
  abuse each other, Some love too little, some too
  long/Some sell, and others buy. Before using
  negative diction and semantics to show that the
  punishment we all deserve for our cruelty is
  given to the condemned man ,
• Nor have a noose about his neck/Nor a cloth
  upon his face/Nor drop feet foremost through the
  floor /Into an empty place.
• This end to the excerpt places us squarely in the
  shoes of the condemned we feel his terror as he
  hangs, an emotional end to this section of the
  poem.

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Crimes of humanity

• Look at the various crimes that Wilde lists in
  stanzas 7-9.
• These all detail ways that man kills the thing he
  loves.
• In pairs select three of the ways Wilde gives and
  think of examples of how this might kill someone.
  Your examples can be traditional or modern e.g.
  some strangle with the hands of lust this
  could apply to men who rape women and so
  something dies inside or someone who kills
  another by giving them an STI.

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Jail Mime

• In groups of three you are going to produce a
  mime for one of the stanzas of the poem.
• You will need someone to be the condemned man and
  maybe another to be the persona of the poem. The
  third will read the stanza as the mime takes
  place. Try to include as many details as
  possible.
• You will be numbered 1-10 and must then find your
  other group members.

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http//www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar
/23/oscar-wilde-ballad-reading-gaol-poem

• Wilde wrote the poem in 1898. He was now free,
  but a broken man, and a broke one. Besides two
  letters, he produced nothing else of literary
  significance before his death. It was first
  published simply under his prisoner
  identification number, C.3-3.
• The poem is dedicated to the memory of the
  "sometime" Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles
  Thomas Wooldridge, and the central incident is
  Wooldridge's execution for the murder of his
  wife. Around this narrative core, whose genre
  might be described as gothic realism, Wilde
  builds a meditation on the paradoxes of morality.
  The Ballad is an indictment of the death penalty
  and the whole penal system, but it is much more
  than a protest poem. It is a revelation, and its
  structure is part of that revelation.
• Everyone can quote the refrain "For each man
  kills the thing he loves." Poetically, it's
  unquestionably powerful, and, intellectually,
  it's powerfully questionable. What does Wilde
  mean? Perhaps he is saying that love itself
  corrupts or alters its object. That would
  certainly seem to have been true of his
  relationship with "Bosie", Lord Alfred Douglas,
  seemingly a spoiled brat further spoiled by
  Wilde's adulation. Judas, of course, is on his
  mind the poem refers to the kiss of Caiaphas,
  the latter being the priest who participated in
  Christ's betrayal.
• Wilde loved paradox, and he found some essential
  symbol of it in the man who murdered his wife.
  Perhaps he found another in the hypocrisy of the
  prison system itself, destroying the souls and
  bodies of those it would reform. The ballad form,
  as he adapts it, encases paradox and story in a
  tight, encircling ring. It is both a Dante-esque
  circle of hell and the deadly routine of prison
  life. It represents the whole cycle of crime and
  punishment. It is inescapable, like the "iron
  gin" mentioned in line 173, a symbol of
  confinement and possibly also an actual machine.
• In the plodding iambic tetrameter and the
  extensive use of refrain and parallelism, we can
  feel at a physical level the grinding
  relentlessness of prison work. The tasks
  Victorian prisoners were set were part of their
  punishment. They would pedal a treadmill with
  their feet, for example, and though some prison
  treadmills were geared to grind corn or raise
  water, others had no use but to enslave. Then
  there was the nasty business of oakum picking, a
  task of unravelling the twine of old tarred ropes
  salvaged from ships. Wilde had worked at this
  until his fingers bled.