The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Oscar Wilde “idolized” his mother, Jane, Lady Wilde.

So says Isobel Murray in the introduction to the Complete Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1997). And yet, he wrote that “the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison” [Murray p. ix].

At Oxford, Wilde lost his Irish accent and took on every appearance of being an Englishman. And except for his fellow Irishmen, like Yeats and Joyce, no one thought of him as Irish until the “post-colonial” period.

Certainly in his early poetry Wilde seemed to be looking to the English tradition for models. Murray calls this poetry “a eulogy of a particular English poetic tradition, nourished by the Classics” [Murray, p. x]. Not only did he “echo” Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, etc., but also he wrote poems praising the English empire.

Yeats and Joyce thought Wilde’s life and work the “consummate mockery of the English” [Murray, p. x]. And so it may have been in his plays and fiction. But his early poetry doesn’t seem to bear that out. Perhaps a contemporary critic such as Owen Dudley Edwards is more accurate in saying “He was at once the metropolitan sophisticate and the loyal son of the Celtic periphery” [Murray, p. ix].

However that may be, it was not until after the second great turning-point in his life, his prison term, that Wilde turned to the ballad, the kind of poem he took in with his mother’s milk.

Ironic somewhat that “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” should be Wilde’s most famous poem because it is the one that violates most of his aesthetic, defined by Murray as “that life imitates art, not the reverse, that ‘in a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow not from life but from each other,’ that ‘all art is useless,’ and that art and propaganda are incompatible [Murray, p. xiv].

Peter Gay would put this more succinctly. Wilde believed in art for art’s sake.

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” published not under Wilde’s name but as Prisoner C.3.3., is a prisoner’s eye-witness account of a fellow inmate, Charles Thomas Woolridge, a trooper of the Royal Horse Guards condemned to hang for murdering his lover. It is usually read as a sort of tract against capitol punishment.

Writing in “Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), Seamus Heaney sees yet another irony. He first encountered the poem in a leather-bound Book of Old Ballads, poems described by the editor as “the very essence of the British spirit” [Heany, p. 84]:

…that Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” should end up in a book of ballads, published in the 1930s with the intention of boosting British patriotism, is the ultimate inversion, since the proper place for this poem would be in a book of Irish ballads, where it would appear as an example of that most disaffected of Irish genres, the gaol journal, a kind of writing popularized by the political defiance of John Mitchel’s prison diaries in the nineteenth century and by the subversive volubility of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy in the twentieth. In “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in other words, Oscar Wilde converted himself into the kind of propagandist poet his mother (the fiery Speranza) had been fifty years before, the kind of poet he had gone to England to avoid becoming; and so one could argue that his literary tragedy was that he did become like his mother, embracing in the end a fervent rhetorical mode of writing which was bound to be artistically deleterious. [Heaney, pp. 87-88]

To include the poem in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, Yeats, with a great deal of self-congratulation, cut the poem from 109 to 38 verses, turning it into what he saw as a realistic description of life in prison. He gave himself credit for turning it into an “almost great” poem. In cutting the melodrama, however, it seems to be Heaney’s argument that he may also have cut much of the poem’s power, the part that sees the condemned prisoner as a double of Wilde himself, a man condemned for a crime of passion. “The poem’s true subject is entrapment, intimacy, and collusion” [Heaney, p. 92].

One of Heaney’s most intriguing notions about “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is that it anticipates the poetry of witness that came out of the horrors of World War I (Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, etc.).

His physical experience of conditions in a Victorian prison, his exposure to the brutality in the lower depths which was matched only by the complacency and impassiveness to be found at higher levels, his recognition of how ruthlessly society covered up its atrocious base, all this put into question the categories of Art and Beauty which had been the fixed stars of his life up to that point. Like much twentieth-century war poetry, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was written in order to warn… [Heaney, p. 94]

And so, for very different reasons, both Seamus Heaney and Peter Gay find Wilde in his imprisonment looking forward to twentieth century Modernism.

Here are the first nine stanzas of the original poem:

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

In Memoriam
C.T.W.
Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards,
Obit HM Prison, Reading, Berkshire,
July 7th, 1896

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.

— Oscar Wilde, from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Complete Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Online text of both the full and the Yeats cut at Bibliomania or as a free downloadable e-book at Project Gutenberg.

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