Oscar Wilde begins his prison meditation, De Profundis, with an aphorism, not the light and witty kind for which his plays are famous, but one which resonates with bleak experience: "Suffering is one very long moment." Having reached the turning point in his despair, the disgraced writer goes on to set out his plan for transforming that experience into a different kind of art and a new kind of life, borrowing Dante's title La Vita Nuova for his own projected resurrection. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, this week's choice, is the fulfilment of that plan.
Wilde wrote the poem in 1898. He was now free, but a broken man, and a broke one. Besides two letters, he produced nothing else of literary significance before his death. It was first published simply under his prisoner identification number, C.3-3.
The poem is dedicated to the memory of the "sometime" Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, and the central incident is Wooldridge's execution for the murder of his wife. Around this narrative core, whose genre might be described as gothic realism, Wilde builds a meditation on the paradoxes of morality. The Ballad is an indictment of the death penalty and the whole penal system, but it is much more than a protest poem. It is a revelation, and its structure is part of that revelation.
Everyone can quote the refrain: "For each man kills the thing he loves." Poetically, it's unquestionably powerful, and, intellectually, it's powerfully questionable. What does Wilde mean? Perhaps he is saying that love itself corrupts or alters its object. That would certainly seem to have been true of his relationship with "Bosie", Lord Alfred Douglas, seemingly a spoiled brat further spoiled by Wilde's adulation. Judas, of course, is on his mind: the poem refers to the kiss of Caiaphas, the latter being the priest who participated in Christ's betrayal.
Wilde loved paradox, and he found some essential symbol of it in the man who murdered his wife. Perhaps he found another in the hypocrisy of the prison system itself, destroying the souls and bodies of those it would reform. The ballad form, as he adapts it, encases paradox and story in a tight, encircling ring. It is both a Dante-esque circle of hell and the deadly routine of prison life. It represents the whole cycle of crime and punishment. It is inescapable, like the "iron gin" mentioned in line 173, a symbol of confinement and possibly also an actual machine.
In the plodding iambic tetrameter and the extensive use of refrain and parallelism, we can feel at a physical level the grinding relentlessness of prison work. The tasks Victorian prisoners were set were part of their punishment. They would pedal a treadmill with their feet, for example, and though some prison treadmills were geared to grind corn or raise water, others had no use but to enslave. Then there was the nasty business of oakum picking, a task of unravelling the twine of old tarred ropes salvaged from ships. Wilde had worked at this until his fingers bled.
In De Profundis he depicts Christ as a poet, with "an intense and flame-like imagination", and describes Christian morality as "all sympathy". The sincerity of Wilde's drama of self-regeneration has sometimes been questioned and there is no doubt a certain posturing: if Christ is poet-like, this suffering poet, he seems to hint, is Christ-like. But the central charge of the Ballad is sympathy, sympathy with the condemned man and his fellow inmates. One tiny revision tells us a lot. The last two lines of stanza 41 originally read: "And I trembled as I groped my way/ Into my numbered tomb." In the second version, the shift from first to third person indicates that effort of sympathy.
Sympathy enables Wilde to remember vivid details and evoke collective feelings. The poem's hellish truthfulness raises it beyond its occasional rhetorical flaws, its purple passages. Suffering is not guaranteed to produce great art, or great humanity. However, there is no doubt that Wilde, the self-dubbed "lord of language", turns his awful humiliation to triumph in the Ballad, and attains a new poetic and moral stature.
There's only room for a short extract, but you can read the whole poem here:
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (extract)
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the horrid hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalt ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.
OSCAR WILDE