The Ballad of Reading Gaol Castle Press
I must acknowledge, I'm writing this post with a box of tissues to hand considering I just cannot read 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' without crying. Bluntly, the story behind the poem is enough to make anyone weep, only then once the verses start I simply tin can't help myself.
To begin with some humour then, earlier it becomes terribly inappropriate, I have to share my top 'Carol' story and warning. For UK readers it may be obvious that the word 'Reading' in the championship refers to the English boondocks. Information technology'south pronounced 'Redding' equally in the colour, instead of everyone's favourite hobby. I accept to say this at the start, because a friend of mine told me virtually a time she attended a lecture on this poem in the States where the whole affair was read as a metaphor 'reading gaol'. At present I'm all for the validity of reader response over authorial omniscience and buying of a text, but there are certain facts that demand to be understood. One, there is a identify chosen Reading. Two, it contained a prison house chosen Reading Gaol. Three, Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in said gaol from 1895-97. The poem does not characterize a theoretical experience, every word is hewn from difficult-wrought soul-searching and trauma. To deny its genesis is to diminish what is meant to be a deeply personal and distraught literary experience.
1 other, more than troubling, betoken of context. The verse form deals with guilt as opposed to innocence. The reason I detect this troubling is that Wilde was convicted of 'gross indecency', basically, for being gay. His 2 years' incarceration with hard labour were the outcome of being institute guilty of 'homosexual acts'. The fact that the poem never deals with the inhumanity of such legislation is just ane more affair that makes me cry.
Instead of detailing Wilde's own experiences, the ballad narrates those of a boyfriend prisoner. It begins:
He did not wear his cherry-red coat,
For blood and vino are blood-red,
And claret and vino were on his easily
When they plant him with the expressionless,
The poor expressionless woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
There is no question of the man's guilt, instead the event is how penalty tin can or should be delivered. The narrator hears a vocalization telling him of the man's legal fate: 'That fellows got to swing':
Honey Christ! the very prison walls
Of a sudden seemed to reel,
And the heaven to a higher place my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My hurting I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his pace, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
So he had to die.
Yet each human being kills the thing he loves,
Past each let this exist heard,
Some do it with a biting look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a buss,
The brave homo with a sword!
Some kill their dear when they are immature,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the easily of Lust,
Some with the easily of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, considering
The dead so shortly 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
All the same each man does not die.
When I was younger, I always read this every bit a kind of anti-honey poem, Wilde's feeling of betrayal as his lovers walked free subsequently (arguably) contributing to his disgrace and encouraging him to announced in courtroom. Was he the dear that had been killed by the unrepentant critics and homophobic mobs? Nowadays I read it differently, Wilde wrote the poem in exile abroad, a broken man. Forth the anger of the poem there is also bang-up humility. Different the superiour aesthetic of 'The Importance of Being Ernest,' the narrator of this poem does not distinguish himself from the common herd. He is as one with his swain prisoners, whether they had washed 'a keen or little thing'. The lines above are a plea to humanity of the inability to punish, despite the inevitability of guilt.
The poem contains wonderful imagery and enough horror to rival Edgar Allen Poe. As well equally powerfully repetitive descriptions of prison life and routines, there are outbursts of psychological torture. These reach their peak as the prisoners run across evil spirits on the nighttime of the execution:
They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of frail turn and twist,
And with formal step and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their tryst.
With mop and mow, nosotros saw them get,
Slim shadows manus in manus:
About, about, in ghostly rout
They trod a saraband:
And the damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand.
With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:
But with flutes of Fearfulness they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they led,
And loud they sang, and long they sang,
For they sang to wake the dead.
'Oho!' they cried, 'The world is wide,
But fettered limbs get lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the secret House of Shame.'
Actually, that's the message of the verse form. There are no winners, those who live and those who die are as guilty and miserable. Every bit the earlier Wilde may have laughed, there is only a thin line between gentlemanly and criminal behaviour. For the purposes of the ballad though, this is not a joke. In that location are consequences for deportment, if not now, then later. No ane can escape the 'high walls' of their fate. At all-time, they tin learn to look truthfully at their fellow man beings, to see humanity in all rather than judging anyone who seems to exist an outsider. There is no hierarchy of sin in the poem, instead at that place is an private obligation of humility. The poem teaches usa to sympathise rather than estimate, to focus on our own faults rather than those of others. It is a plea for clemency and mercy; for those of us reading it in context, it is also a powerful polemic against injustice and prejudice, whenever they might occur.
Source: https://shoshibookblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol/
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