Wilde too was separated from his wife and sons.

Wilde juxtaposes the executed man and himself with the line 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves'.

No attempt is made to assess the justice of the laws which convicted them, but rather the poem highlights the brutalisation of the punishment that all convicts share. The poem narrates the execution of Wooldridge it moves from an objective story-telling to symbolic identification with the prisoners as a whole. Wilde wrote the poem in mid-1897 while staying with Robert Ross in Berneval-le-Grand. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. Charles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.ĭuring his imprisonment, on Tuesday, 7 July 1896, a hanging took place. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol ( / r ɛ. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to. If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

The ballad of gaol