I love, love, love this poem.

I love, love, love this edition (early 1900s, 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. Yet, trooper Charles Thomas Woolridge of the Royal Horse Guards, will live forever thanks to Wilde's pen.

The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Book Season = Year Round (petal by petal)

Özel hayatı yüzünden 2 yıllık hapse mahkum edilen şair gönderildiği Reading Zindanı'nda idama mahkum edilmiş bir adamdan çok etkilenir. Bu adam sevdiği kadın ondan ayrılmak isteyince ve buluşmaya gelmeyince usturayla boğazını kesmiştir.

Gözlerindeki pişmanlık ve ölümü kabullenişinin tasvirleri, hapishane hayatının insanı nasıl yavaş yavaş çürüttüğü etkileyici imgelerle anlatılmış.

Ama bir katili yüceltme şekli hoşuma gitmedi.

Dört yıl bir çeviri ile uğraşılınca inanılmaz güzel olmuş doğal olarak. Öyle bir balad ki kendimi reading zindanında hissettim gerçekten.

Reviewed for Books and livres

Everybody knows that Oscar Wilde wrote this beautiful, dark and haunting poem after he was sent to jail for 2 years for just being who he was, a homosexual.
This must have been a dreadful change of life for him, the dandy who loved refinery so much, and totally life-altering to look in the face men that he knew would soon die. By the way, he himself died only two years later.
The poem concentrated mainly on a man who "killed the thing he loved, and so he had to die", but more generally on life in prison.
This is a very short book (my edition, bilingual, was 57 pages long) but deeply moving.

"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 !"

"In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie :
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh :
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

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 !"

I guess you could say this poem was pretty wild (I hate myself)

Oscar Wilde’ı İngilizce orijinalinden okumak harcım değil, ama kitabın uhrevi dilini filtresiz olarak okumuş olmaktan dolayı bahtiyarım :)

What a beautiful and haunting poem. The imagery and imagination Wilde expresses in this poem is fantastic and I believe it present clear evidence that Wilde accepted Christ as his Lord while serving time in gaol. A great reflection on life, imprisonment, and facing the prospect of meeting your Maker in a short while.

n  “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...n

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.

ابتدای کتاب شرح خاطراتی که آندره ژید از دیدارهایی که با اسکار وایلد داشته، شروع می‌‌شه
و بعد اشعاری که اسکار وایلد سروده بود
بی‌شک اسکار وایلد نابغه‌ای بوده که اونطور که باید دیده نشد و بی‌شک زندانی شدن ایشون بخاطر اتهامی که بهش زده شد، بی‌تاثیر نبود.
نمایشنامه سالومه رو، اسکار وایلد زمانی دادگاهی اش کرده بودن برای یکی از هنرپیشه‌های زنِ معروف پاریس فرستاد و ازش درخواست کرد تا این نمایشنامه رو به قیمت ۴۰۰ دلار ازش بخره تا بتونه با این پول وکیلی رو برای خودش بگیره تا تبرئه بشه ولی اون زن این نمایشنامه رو ازش نخرید، متاسفانه.
زمانی که اسکار وایلد برای یک خطابه کوتاه به آمریکا سفر کرده بود، مامور گمرگ ازش می‌پرسه چه چیزی رو با خودتون آوردید؟
اسکار وایلد در جواب میگه: نبوغم!
این نویسنده، شاعر و نمایشنامه توانا در جوانی و فقر و در یکی از هتل‌های پاریس فوت شد
و زمانی که ایشون رو به قبرستان می‌بردند تنها شش نفر جنازه ایشون رو تشییع می‌کردن...
این کتاب رو ‌pdf خوندم که متاسفانه کیفیت مطلوبی نداشت.. به همین خاطر نتونستم شعری از ایشون رو ضمیمه این مطلب کنم

Rastgele başladığım bir kitabın kalbimde sızı oluşturacağını hiç düşünmemiştim. Oscar Wilde, eşcinsellik yüzünden hapis yattığı dönem gözünün önünde idam edilen şahısa ithafen yazmış koca kitabı. Evet şiir kitabı ama olayı çok güzel vermiş, Wilde 'ın hissettiklerini ben de hissettim. Ama adam masum değil bunun da altını çizmekte fayda var.

Oysa herkes öldürür sevdiğini,
Bunu böyle bilin,
Kimi hazin bir bakışla öldürür,
Kimi latif bir sözle,
Korkaklar öperek öldürür,
Yürekliler kılıç darbeleriyle!

Kimi gençken öldürür sevdiğini,
Kimi ihtiyarken;
Kimi şehvetli ellerle boğar,
Kimi sevdiğini altına boğar:
Merhametlisi bıçağını savurur,
Çünkü böyle ölen çabuk soğur.

Kimi az sever, kimi çok,
Kimi alır, kimi satar;
Kimi öldürürken gözyaşı döker de,
Kimi gözünü bile kırpmaz:
Çünkü herkes öldürür sevdiğini,
Ama herkes öldürdü diye ölmez.<b>




Çünkü kanı ancak kan temizleyebilir,
Yaraları da ancak gözyaşı sarabilirdi...

Compassion that radiates from the text of the poem.

This is a pretty stunning entry in anti-prison literature, so I am surprised that I haven’t heard of it until just recently. Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for two years, beginning in 1895, when he was convicted of “sodomy” and “gross indecency” after being caught having sexual relationships with men. This lengthy poem (pushing 700 lines) details the abject inhumanity of incarceration, and it is one of the last things that Wilde ever published before he died shortly after his release.

The poem is, expectedly, dark. Bleak. The dramatic action in the poem centers around a pending execution of a man who murdered his wife and then turned himself into the police. The execution is then at last carried out. Languishing, waiting, suffering, Wilde describes the only men in the prison who hold onto hope as “witless.” He writes that the people in Reading Gaol (the English prison where he was locked up) were people who “the world had thrust from its heart, and God from out his care.”

But the fifth and sixth sections introduce a powerful shift: out from the immediate experience suffering and despair and on to an awareness that the system producing them is man-made, and perhaps even illegitimate. “I know not whether Laws be right, / Or whether Laws be wrong; / All that we know who lie in gaol / Is that the wall is strong.” And later: “This too I know… / That every prison men build / Is built with bricks of shame, / And bound with bars lest Christ should see / How men their brothers maim.” In the end, it is the man who was executed who “Waits for the holy hands that took / The Thief to Paradise,” who is assured in the poem that “The Lord will not despise.” It is rather “The man in red who reads the Law” whose divine fate in the afterlife is left unresolved.

The poem, to me, reads as a compelling early entry in the literature of prison abolition. As a queer reader and as someone sick about the ever-enlarging maw of mass incarceration, I found this poem to be deeply affecting, and grounding. I deduct a star for form only because I think this poem could have been tighter. The motif of repetition that Wilde weaves into the poem (several fragments of the poem repeating themselves throughout) may have purpose in emphasizing the unending drudgery of incarceration, which is pierced only by moments of acute horror, but in such a long poem I found that this tactic works against rather than for him. (Sorry Oscar!)

Overall: a truly remarkable poem. A truly horrifying record of homophobia and incarceration brutally meeting. One that I will carry with me. And finally, the truly poignant source from which Wilde’s tombstone epigraph is drawn:

“His mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.”