I confess to not in general having much time for the work of Oscar Wilde. I find the witticisms too carefully manufactured and the plays tediously unfunny, though I admit that as the chandelier episode in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ had me rolling on the floor it may be that my sense of humour lacks a certain sophistication. But my real problem with Wilde’s work is the feeling it gives me that he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying or he hasn’t thought it through enough. Those aphorisms seem designed to appeal to the adolescent in us: neatly subversive and without too much in the way of nuance to tax our underdeveloped brains. ‘For each man kills the thing he loves…’ Well, of course he doesn’t. The world is full of people who do a pretty good lifelong job of cherishing the thing they love, whether a partner, children, dogs, music, ageing donkeys or a patch of woodland… But this said, I think we can grant that the poem in which that doubtful sentiment appears, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, still has considerable power. It appeared in 1896, and was inspired by a time that Wilde spent in the gaol for what was then perceived as ‘gross indecency’. It is a long poem, full of anger and pity, of which I give only the opening stanzas. The fellow who had to swing was one Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards who had murdered his estranged wife; Wilde never met him but would observe him at exercise in the prison yard, and was deeply moved by his demeanour. It is as if life had finally got Oscar in a corner and said ‘Right, let’s see what you’re really made of’. And it turned out Oscar really was made of something.

Incidentally Reading Gaol, which I used to pass every day on my way to work, closed as a prison in 2014, and after various unsuccessful attempts to develop it as an arts hub was finally sold in January this year to a Chinese educational foundation. I don’t know what Oscar would make of that, but no doubt he would have something to say.

From ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby gray;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

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!

Oscar Wilde