The Ballad of Reading Gaol
‘THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL is one of the last things Oscar Wilde wrote. He had gone to France after his release from prison and taken rooms at the inn in the little hamlet of Berneval, near Dieppe. For the moment he was content in the country. "If I live in Paris," he wrote, "I may be doomed to things I don’t desire. I am afraid of big towns." He made friends with the people about, thought of building a house there, and did take a chalet for the season. About two months after leaving prison he wrote of the Ballad: "The poem is nearly finished. Some of the verses are awfully good." Soon afterwards he changed his plans and went to Naples, and there and in Rome he revised the Ballad. It was published under a pseudonym next year. Arthur Ransome said of Wilde that he had now become anxious to speak and to be heard, and was no longer content to make and to be admixugd. And he wrote of the Ballad: "I know of no other poem that so intensifies our horror of mortality ... he lives an hundred times life’s last moments, and multiplies
the agony of the man who dies in the hearts of all those others who feel with him how frail is their own perilous hold." Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, seldom read or heard in full, is to be read by Alan de Malmanche from 3YC at 9.30 p.m. on July 13.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540709.2.20
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 9
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255The Ballad of Reading Gaol New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 9
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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