Tone Of The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

ENG205
Literary Analysis: Oscar Wilde

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is not the work that Wilde wrote while imprisoned for moral (in his case, homosexual) offences in 1895; that work was De Profundis, published five years after his death, in 1905 (Damrosh, 1004). The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written after his release and in France, in 1897, though it was published in 1898. His works during this exile were published under the name Sebastian Melmouth. The poem is written in memory of "C.T.W." who died in Reading prison in July 1896 and it traces the feelings of an imprisoned man towards a fellow inmate who is to be hanged. They are "like two doomed ships that pass in storm", and Wilde creates a solemn tone in
That includes the people in our lives. We change them, and so while we do not literally kill them, we arguably end up killing what we originally loved about them. That, after all, is why so many relationships (and friendships) eventually come to an end. If we cannot keep finding new things to love about people, or love the changes in them, love dies. It flashes the incidents, so many of them, where people have actually, physically and not metaphorically, killed the objects of their love. Man's nature to possess and cling to the objects of love turns him so selfish that he turn can turn barbaric and
The poem starts off with Part I, consisting of 16 stanzas, which tells of a prisoner who murdered the woman he loved and was sentenced to death for that crime. There is a subdivison after the first six stanzas in which Part Ia only focuses on the prisoner concerned; while Part Ib, on the other hand, takes a far wider perspective, reflecting about men in general, who all kill "the thing they love" but who do not all have to die. A description about the horrible conditions of prison rounds off that part. Part II consists of 13 verses and is built up similarly to Part I. The first six stanzas, Part IIa, come back to the condemned man; the remaining seven verses, Part IIb, are focusing on a larger group, in this case the whole of the prisoners and their life-and-death fears. The fate hanging over the condemned man seems to be a threat to all of them. Additionally, the life "outside", where free persons live, love and dance, is contrasted to the life "inside" the prison walls where prisoners sit out their sentence indifferently and pass each other without signing or speaking. Part III is the longest one with 37 stanzas. Part IIIa, the first twelve verses, describes how the prisoners see the condemned man for the last time noting the "yellow hole" (Wilde, 9), the grave which is already waiting for the corpse of the man. Part IIIb, consisting of only six stanzas, focuses on the evening