course guidelines path one calendar class discussion path two calendar essay prompts reference pages


ornamental line

Horror Stalks

"And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel" (ll.29-30).
Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898)

 

Points for Reflection

Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1897; 1898)

  1. how does the doomed Charles Thomas Woolridge, the unnamed victim of the poem, face his approaching death?
  2. how many different ways do humans kill those that they love, according to the narrator?
  3. why might killing someone with a knife be the “kindest” way to kill someone (1.43-78)?
  4. what does the narrator mean by the claim that “each man does not die” (1.54)?
  5. can you identify any of the Biblical allusions made by Wilde? To what end does he employ these? Is he seeking to upend or ratify the principles on which he touches?
  6. why might Wilde so blatantly repeat the substance of lines 1.7-18 in lines 97-108; 2.1-12?  Why employ such repetition?  (He does elsewhere too.)
  7. does the narrator claim it is easier, or harder, to embrace Divine hope when faced with capital punishment (ll.139-44; 2.43-48)?
  8. is the narrator’s feeling of being thrust outside God’s grace (l.172; 2.76) ever countered?
  9. do the prison governor, doctor, and chaplain provide either compassion or hope? 
  10. do any of the jobs demanded of the prisoners (ll.217-26; 3.43-54) allow them that creative expression so valued by John Ruskin?
  11. which prisoners successfully sleep the night before the hanging, and why? 
  12. what precipitates the appearance of those evil sprites who walk and dance about?
  13. do any images in this poem echo those found in Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House”?
  14. do the evil sprites described by the narrator have a clear agenda?
  15. how do the evil sprites “help” the prisoners at their prayer (l.324; 3.150)?  
  16. how might the narrator have lived “more lives than one (l.395; 3.221)? 
  17. following the hanging, how do the Warders move about compared with the prisoners? 
  18. what is the sheet of flame which encompasses the dead prisoner? 
  19. does the narrator believe a prisoner’s corpse makes good fertilizer? 
  20. does the narrator imagine the criminal suffering in Hell?  
  21. does the prison Chaplain bless the corpse
  22. does the narrator recognize human law as just and sound? 
  23. why do governments build prisoners with brick and bars, according to the narrator? 
  24. does prison have an ameliorating and/or corrective influence on those it houses? 
  25. which emotion is not effectively squelched by prison?
  26. are the prisoners encouraged to speak? 
  27. what might Wilde mean by the repeated notion that men "kill the thing they love” (ll.35, 53, 649; 1.35, 1.53, 6.13)?


"The Darkling Thrush" (1899, Dec 29, 1900)

  1. does this poem's posture towards Nature differ from or resemble that of various Romantic and Victorian works which also contain a focused encounter between sentient and non-sentient beings? You might consider the following titles from the M.A. reading list: WW's "Tintern Abbey," STC's "The Eolian Harp," JK's "Ode to a Nightingale," and CB's Jane Eyre.
  2. what specific adjectives and verbs does Thomas Hardy employ in the first two stanzas to create the poem's despondent atmosphere? Consider some alternatives that would shift the poem's tone radically.
  3. could the scene painted by these first two stanzas be described with denotatively similar but tonally different adjectives and verbs? Could one, that is, change the mood without changing the scene's details?
  4. this poem moves from a somber tone to a hopeful mood, and concludes on what sort of note in its final lines?
  5. why might the narrator have such a bleak outlook on life?



a black and white drawing of a large, bold structure with fences and many small windows. The landscape around it is minimal with a few scattered trees.
Reading Gaol
Hulton Archive / Getty Images



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu