The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Wilde’s poem employs a variation of the ballad stanza (hence the title, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”). Ballad stanzas were most closely associated with English folk poetry and usually featured a quatrain (four-line stanza) with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, and with an ABCB rhyme scheme. An iamb is a metrical foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM). A tetrameter is a line made up of four metrical feet, while a trimeter is a line with three feet. Wilde’s take on the ballad, on the other hand, uses sestets (six-line stanzas). Like in the typical ballad, the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter; stanzas employ an ABCBDB rhyme scheme. The poem has a total of 109 stanzas divided into six sections.

Iambic feet in English poetry can be substituted to vary the rhythm. Possible substitutions include replacing an iamb with a trochee (DUM-da), as in line 32 of Section 1 (“Quickened”), or replacing two iambic feet with a double iamb—a pyrrhic (da-da) followed by a spondee (DUM-DUM), as in line 4 of Section 1 (“When they | found him”).

Paradox

A paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory, but contains a deeper meaning or truth. Wilde leans heavily on paradox throughout the poem. The famous refrain “each man kills the thing he loves” (1.37, 1.53) is a particularly challenging paradox, pushing readers to reflect on the ways that they have hurt those that they loved through their sins. Also paradoxical is Wilde’s portrayal of the condemned man as “light and gay” (1.10, 2.4, 2.32), eagerly awaiting his death rather than displaying signs of fear. Another important paradox involves the conduct of the prison officials toward the condemned man: They “watch him lest himself should rob / The prison of its prey” (1.65-66)—in other words, the guards prevent death by suicide so that they can execute him. These paradoxes all serve to underline the fundamentally perverse nature of the penal system, which seeks to rehabilitate and redeem those who made others suffer by making them suffer or even killing them, “For only blood can wipe out blood, / And only tears can heal” (5.99-100).

Parallelism and Repetition

Parallelism and repetition also play an important role in the poem, creating a sense of thematic and linguistic balance by repeating specific phrases or ideas at different parts of the poem. As in many of Wilde’s works, the almost incessant repetition is effective in unifying the poem and highlighting its central themes. The idea that “each man kills the thing he loves” (1.37, 1.53), for example, is underscored through repetition, becoming a kind of refrain as it is restated at key moments in the poem (twice in the first section and once again in the final stanza of the final section).

The poem employs repetition elsewhere too. The “suit of shabby grey” (1.8) that the condemned man wears at his trial resurfaces and is transformed in the “suit of shabby grey” (2.2) of his prison uniform. The “wistful eye” with which the prisoner looks “[u]pon that little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky” (1.14-16) becomes another refrain, resurfacing in the second section (2.8-10) and finally in the Section 4 (4.20-22), where it is the other inmates who assume the wistfulness of the now-dead man. Other key ideas that are repeated throughout the poem include the shame of prison life (“death of shame,” “House of Shame,” “rope of shame,” etc.), Hell (“red Hell,” “separate Hell,” etc.), and the soul (“soul[s] in pain,” “sightless soul,” “soul intent,” etc.).