The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

The poem’s famous refrain, “each man kills the thing he loves” (1.37,1.53)—is also the central theme. This idea is as challenging as it is memorable. What does Wilde mean when he accuses everybody of killing the thing they love? The condemned man—Charles Thomas Wooldridge—has literally killed his love, murdering his wife in a fit of rage. But not every case is this obvious, as everybody ruins what they love in their own way:

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! (1.39-42, 6.15-18).

Not only do people kill the thing they love in a variety of ways, they do so at different stages in their lives: “some […] when they are young, / And some when they are old” (1.43-44). They also have different motives, such as “Lust” (1.45) or “Gold” (46). Perhaps most importantly for the narrator, however, not everybody suffers the same punishment for this action. In fact, many do not suffer punishment at all, though it is precisely in that punishment that the poet (and the condemned man) find redemption.

Those who kill the thing they love do not always do so literally. Wilde seems to also have himself in mind when he declares that “each man kills the thing he loves” (1.37). Wilde’s tumultuous affairs, especially his affair with Douglas, resulted in his incarceration, which in turn forced him to leave his wife and children. Not only did his family face humiliation and shame because of Wilde’s actions, but we can read the marital betrayal and secret infidelity into Wilde’s description of the “coward” who “does it with a kiss” and a “flattering word”—ways to avoid his wife’s suspicion. And though Wilde was not executed for his misdeeds like Wooldridge, he was punished, suffering “a death of shame” (1.55) that is its own kind of torment.

Throughout the poem, the psychological and spiritual experiences of the prisoners at Reading Gaol—including those of the condemned man and the narrator—set them apart from the rest of the world. Subjected to the “Separate System” of the Victorian prison, each of the inmates suffers their own “separate Hell” (4.12, 5.58), but they are still united in a certain kinship. They are all “souls in pain” (1.19) who experience the “Debtors’ Yard” where “the stones are hard / And the dripping wall is high” (3.1-2), and where they must complete their prescribed hard labor:

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 (3.43-52).

The prisoners become isolated and pathetic figures. The narrator describes them as a parody of a “Fool’s Parade” (3.38) or “The Devil’s Own Brigade” (3.40). Their experiences, moreover, are unique to their small community, and thus inaccessible to the rest of the world. The prison officials, such as the warders and the guards, cannot understand, for example, why the inmates cannot sleep the night before the condemned man is to be hanged. But for the narrator and the other inmates, the bond is powerful, if tacit. Thus, though the narrator admits that he never spoke to the condemned man (“we made no sign, we said no word, / We had no word to say” [2.69-70]), he still identifies with him:

A prison wall was round us both,

Two outcast men were we:

The world had thrust us from its heart,

And God from out His care:

And the iron gin that waits for Sin

Had caught us in its snare (3.73-78).

The narrator does not openly judge whether the penal system is just. Yet the horrors experienced by the prisoners speak for themselves: The Reading Gaol of the poem, painted in the colors of Wilde’s gothic realism, conveys a sense of shared shame and terror.