Sherry Chandler

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.

Lady Jane Wilde

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, from The Importance of Being Earnest*

Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (1821-1896), had her own run-ins with the law. She was a fire-brand for Irish independence and women’s rights. Under the pseudonym Speranza, she published poems and commentary in The Nation, a Nationalist newspaper established by the Young Ireland Party. I often see her poetry described as “anti-famine.” Speranza was active in the 1840s; the potato blight struck in 1845.

Up until The Great Hunger, the Young Irelanders had been a nonviolent movement. The famine changed that. When, in 1848, Speranza wrote an article calling for armed rebellion and the paper’s publisher refused to reveal her name, the British government shut the paper down.

The Young Irelander or Famine Rebellion began on July 29, 1848, after the British suspended habeas corpus. It failed rather quickly. One of its leaders, William Smith O’Brien, was found guilty of treason and subsequently sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Another, Thomas Francis Meagher, found guilty of sedition, was also sentenced to death. Because of “public outcry,” both sentences were commuted to expulsion to Van Diemen’s Land. Meagher later escaped to the United States, where he led the Irish Brigade in the Civil War.

Lady Wilde was widowed at 55 and, discovering that her husband had left her very little, she moved from Dublin to London to live with her older son Willie, who was a journalist. Oscar, of course, was also in London at this time. Lady Wilde eked out a living writing books and articles on Irish folklore.

She was among those who urged Oscar to stick in London and fight his conviction.

At age 75, she contracted bronchitis, and knowing that she was dying, she asked permission to visit Oscar in prison. The permission was denied. She died on February 3, 1896. Oscar paid for her funeral but could not afford a tombstone so she was buried anonymously in common ground.

The Victorian Women Writers Project has an online copy of Poems by Speranza, 2nd edition, published about 1871. I find them the worst kind of patriotic doggerel, the kind of thing Wilfred Owen later condemned in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Given Lady Wilde’s circumstances, the excessive ardor for heroes might be understood, but that still can’t make her a great poet by modern standards. The example below is the most palatable one I could find.

Her Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, posted by Library Ireland, is a lot more fun.

There was a man, also, equally dreaded on account of the strange, fatal power of his glance; and so many accidents and misfortunes were traced to his presence that finally the neighbours insisted that he should wear a black patch over the Evil Eye, not to be removed unless by request; for learned gentlemen, curious in such things, sometimes came to him to ask for a proof of his power, and he would try it for a wager while drinking with his friends.

One day, near an old ruin of a castle, he met a boy weeping in great grief for his pet pigeon, which had got up to the very top of the ruin, and could not be coaxed down.

“What will you give me,” asked the man, “if I bring it down for you?”

“I have nothing to give,” said the boy, “but I will pray to God for you. Only get me back my pigeon, and I shall be happy.”

Then the man took off the black patch and looked up steadfastly at the bird; when all of a sudden it fell to the ground and lay motionless, as if stunned; but there was no harm done to it, and the boy took it up and went his way, rejoicing.

Lady Wilde’s poem. I’ve no idea who the traitor is. Tone and Fitzgerald were players in the Rebellion of 1798:

A LAMENT.

I.

GONE from us–dead to us–he whom we worshipped so!
      Low lies the altar we raised to his name;
Madly his own hand hath shattered and laid it low–
      Madly his own breath hath blasted his fame.
He whose proud bosom once raged with humanity,
      He whose broad forehead was circled with might,
Sunk to a time-serving, driv’lling inanity–
      God! Why not spare our loved country the sight?

II.

Was it the gold of the stranger that tempted him?
      Ah! we’d have pledged to him body and soul;
Toiled for him–fought for him–starved for him–died for him–
      Smiled, tho’ our graves were the steps to his goal.
Breathed he one word in his deep, earnest whispering,
      Wealth, crown, and kingdom, were laid at his feet;
Raised he his right hand, the millions would round him cling–
      Hush! ’tis the Sassenach ally you greet.

III.

Leaders have fallen–we wept, but we triumphed, too–
      Patriot blood never sinks in the sod;
He falls, and the jeers of the nation he bent to sue
      Rise like accusing weird spirits to God.
Weep for him–weep for him–deep is the tragedy–
      Angels themselves now might doubt of God’s truth;
Souls from their bloody graves, shuddering, rise to see
      How he avenges their lost, murdered youth.

IV.

Tone, and Fitzgerald, and the pale-brow’d enthusiast–
      He whose heart broke, but shrank not from the strife;
Davis, the latest loved–he who in glory passed,
      Kindling Hope’s lamp with the chrism of life.
Well may they wail for him–power and might were his–
      Loved as no mortal was loved in the land–
What has he sold them for? Sorrow and shame it is,
      Fair words and false from a recreant band.

V.

Time’s shade was on him; what matter? we loved him yet;
      Aye, would have torn the veins with our teeth,
Made him a bath of our young blood to pay the debt–
      Purchased his life, tho’ we bought it by death.
Pray for him–pray: an archangel has fallen low;
      There’s a throne less in Heaven, there is sorrow on earth.
Weep, angels–laugh, demons! When his hand could strike the blow,
      Where shall we seek for truth, honour, or worth?

— Lady Jane Wilde, from Poems
Transcribed and encoded by Carolyn C. Sherayko
Edited by Perry Willett
TEI formatted filesize uncompressed: approx. 339 kbytes
Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS), Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
July 31, 1996

____________
*I found this quote as a head note to Seamus Heaney’s lecture “Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995). A tidbit from that essay: according to Heaney, Lady Wilde traced her maiden name, Elgee, to Alighieri, and so considered herself a descendant of Dante.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was famously tried for sodomy, convicted, and sentenced to two years at hard labor. He just as famously refused to flee England and escape the sentence that killed him. Peter Gay, in Modernism, asks why? And what did it mean for Modernism, of which Wilde was so vocal an advocate:

That art for art’s sake had originated in France did not make it any more acceptable to those not fortunate enough to be French. But in the end it is significant that Yeats, that powerful modernist poet, wanted Wilde to stay and face his accusers. That self-sacrifice, Yeats believed, did much for Wilde’s reputation: “he owes to that decision half of his renown.” This is not very convincing. Wilde’s lasting fame rests on his writings, far more than on his willingness to accept suffering he could have escaped. But Yeats had a point: the stake of avant-garde thinking in Wilde’s history was considerable. Granted, his martyrdom, like many martyrdoms, was largely in vain. Neither the autonomy of art nor the sovereignty of the artist was much advanced by it. But Wilde’s consistent aestheticism, his courage to be pilloried as an eccentric, became a wry kind of model for a few choice spirits who would carry their defiant modernist individualism into the twentieth century.

Wilde died, significantly enough in this context, in 1900.

And Robert Peake, if you read here, you should know that over time I have reconsidered my opinion of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Wilde. He did rather sigh a lot, and whine. It was my affection for Fry clouding my judgment, I think.

And yet, I find when I picture Mr. Wilde in my mind these days he often seems to wear Mr. Fry’s rather distinctive physiognomy.

A poem from Mr. Wilde:

Impression du Matin

THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses� walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul�s
Loomed like a bubble o�er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps� flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone

— Oscar Wilde, from Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

____________
Note: The French title strikes me as a little precious but the poem itself is effective, if a bit romantic. Isobel Murray, in her introduction to the Oxford edition of Wilde’s Complete Poetry, says

Wilde the poet is rarely a metropolitan sophisticate: when he is, the metropolis has a flavour of Paris, rather than London.

Certainly true of this poem, which as it turns out is one that Murray singles out as being particularly Parisian in mood. Though the poem describes London, it is a London that sounds a lot like an impressionist painting of Paris. To me, anyway.

A certain irony in Oxford putting out a complete Oscar Wilde because the Oxford dons in their wisdom refused the gift of Wilde’s only volume of verse, Poems, that he self-published in 1881. Plagiarism was their cry, an accusation that followed this volume down into the late 20th Century, when critics decided to redefine it as “echoing.”

Certainly Wilde himself never apologized or acted in the least guilty about his verse. In a typical Wildean gesture, he is said to have used this “attractively” published volume as a variety of visiting card, especially in France.