Beautiful! Wonderful, heartfelt, full of wisdom, with the most exquisite language.

It’s more of a skim-read for me because I didn’t want to spend time diving into the details, but it’s all beautiful

I can't read this. Poetry is like the truth, most people fucking hate poetry!

"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 am not the biggest fan of poetry, if I'm being honest, but I am a fan of Wilde's writing. This poem is haunting and knowing that this was written shortly after he was released from prison adds a layer of ache and despair. Though there is an underlying story of a murderer in the jail who threw his entire life away by committing his crime, the underlying understanding that the reality of Wilde's life would thereafter be completely thrown into disarray... it is really just devastating.

I am a staunch opposer to imprisonment as a form of punishment, and I have only one statement to support my argument: "since periods of imprisonment are often prolonged, the effect on the inmates' well-being is detrimental."

This is a beautiful poem by Wilde, and having read it and read De Profundis, I could easily say that I felt his suffering more tangibly through The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

When he speaks about the possibility of going astray he is not exaggerating: many prisoners do become worse after their incarceration. I quote:

"So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray."

How prisoners perceive things like the sky and their own cells just shows how everything loses meaning while they're locked in..."The tent of blue they call the sky and the cells that are numbered tombs..."

He perfectly, poignantly describes how they feel not only as disgraced sinners, but as humans who see no future:

"Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was hope..."

And then at the moment of the execution of their fellow prisoner, he says:

"And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I;
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die."

No one is reformed in Reading, he argues, for if they survive the hell of it, they emerge broken:

"It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers here.."

Loved it ❤️

Just a disclaimer, apparently Gaol is not pronounced as Gah-owl, it's pronounced as jail. I didn't know that while reading this poem

I am not much into poems and ballads. I only read them occasionally. But, my, oh my, this one was damn good. Such beautiful writing! The author described well from his own experience in prison, the sufferings, sadness and hopelessness undergone by the inmates. I hope to explore more of this author's other works in the future.

Oscar Wilde’s final poem is famously connected to his time spent in Reading Gaol in 1896, where he served two years for “gross indecency with men.” Fully aware of the penalties for homosexuality in 1890s England, Wilde married and had two sons. But in 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young British poet and aristocrat 16 years his junior.
Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was outraged by the relationship and sought to expose Wilde. Wilde reacted by filing a libel suit against the Marquess and it was from this action that his own trial and conviction sprang.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is more than an indictment of the system which sent Wilde to jail, however. It is a treatise on what it is to suffer incarceration, the inadequacies of both the society and its religious arm to forgive or sympathize with the incarcerated, and the hopelessness of love to save any man from suffering.

Its most famous lines:

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.

say a great deal about both the feelings of betrayal Wilde was experiencing and his recognition that the betrayal was worse than the punishment coldly inflicted by the judicial system.

There are serious religious overtones to the poem, in which many references to the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ are referenced. In the above stanza, one cannot help immediately conjuring the kiss of Judas.

Since the major premise of the poem is that of a man convicted of murder and being hanged, it is ironic to see Wilde tie the murder to love and passion; the punishment to a complete lack of feeling or understanding of humanity. It is the prisoners, themselves, who fall on their knees in prayer for the soul of this man, it is the other sinners who plead with God for his intercession; for the righteous, or those who set themselves up to be so, cannot feel the pain on any level at all. Even the priest is just a man who hands out tracts. He is happy to lay the corpse and move on.

The dehumanizing of the imprisoned is so complete that even after they are dead they are denied the comfort of flowers on their graves. In fact, the true purpose of the denial is so that no other prisoner might see the flowers blooming and take hope from the fact that beauty, or perhaps forgiveness, exists. There is to be no hope, for this is meant to erase the humanity of the men; so that the lucky man is the one executed and killed only once, as those who are held are erased, spiritually killed, daily.

«ولی بگذار که همه بشنوند و بدانند
که هرکس آن‌ چیزی را که دوست می‌دارد می‌کُشد
بعضی با یک نگاه
بعضی با یک حرف
پست‌فطرتان آن را با یک بوسه انجام می‌دهند
و مردان دلاور با یک شمشیر.»

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

Oscar Wilde hakkında çok şey öğrenmemi sağlayan bir kitap oldu. Yazmak için esinlendiği kişinin de hikayesi çok ilginç. Bir vakit bulduğunuzda okuyun derim zaten hızlıca da okunuyor

Only by being broken can a sinner be joined to God. Only by dyeing oneself in blood can blood be cleansed.

This is a haunting poem because it asks— what is the proper consequence to crime? To what extent does a human being get to control the state and timeline of another’s life? Obviously, we consider murder wrong, yet it’s moral if we do it within the constraints of the law?

But more than that, are we allowed to dehumanize someone else in the name of safety and security of the general population, or are we just perpetuating the violence that we claim to abhor?

These are complex questions, and it’s a poem that certainly forces you to take a hard look at the frameworks of society and how we are built by hypocrisy.

I don't know what I suspected, but my previous experiences with Oscar Wilde's writing did not prepare me for this. I love Wilde's wit, his funny, frothy, skewering truth. But there was none of that here. Instead it was beautiful in a completely different way. Haunting and so sad, a study of the condemned man and yet so many other things as well. I think this may become one of my favorite poems.