Within this part of the poem, Wilde also compares the condemned inmate's situation to the situations faced by other men, saying repeatedly that 'each man kills the thing he loves' as the inmate killed the woman he loved. The first part of the poem consists of several verses describing the prisoner: his appearance, emotions, and situation. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is a poetic description of Oscar Wilde's experiences in prison, specifically witnessing the sentence and execution of a fellow inmate at Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in 1900, lonely and the shell of the man he once was, but still appreciated his writing. After his time spent in prison, Oscar Wilde never returned to England again. The contrast between the free people who live outside the prison and the inmates is highlighted by Oscar Wilde in his poem. The poem starts by focusing only on one man, a person convicted for murdering his wife and sentenced to death and then slowly starts to describe the living conditions of the prisoners. The ballad consists of 109 stanzas and is divided into the parts. The poem was revised a couple of times and enlarged before it was published in October. After Oscar Wilde was released in 1897, he soon fled to Paris where he assumed a new name and started writing the poem almost immediately. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned because of his relationship with the son of an influential man and the time spent in prison affected his life greatly. The poem was written after two years after Oscar Wilde was released from prison and the poem focuses on the execution of one of the prison inmate who was in the same prison as Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of Reading Goal was among the last written works of Oscar Wilde. It is a revelation, and its structure is part of that revelation. The Ballad is an indictment of the death penalty and the whole penal system, but it is much more than a protest poem. Around this narrative core, whose genre might be described as gothic realism, Wilde builds a meditation on the paradoxes of morality. The poem is dedicated to the memory of the Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, and the central incident is Wooldridge's execution for the murder of his wife. It was first published simply under his prisoner identification number, C.3-3. Besides two letters, he produced nothing else of literary significance before his death. Oscar Wilde's indictment of the Victorian penal system, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

The ballad of reading jail