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Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Wilde’s meditation on capital punishment, the Ballad of Reading Gaol comes after he was convicted and imprisoned under charges of gross indecency. The charges stemmed from his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry. It relates the story of an execution of a man who murdered his wife which Wilde witnessed during his internment. Published in 1898, it was Wilde’s last published poem as he would die in 1900 from cerebral menengitis, caused by syphilis. (Summary by John Gonzalez) * Gutenberg e-text * Wikipedia - Oscar Wilde * Wikipedia - The Ballad of Reading Gaol * LibriVox’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol Internet Archive page * Zip file of the entire book 15.7MB * RSS feed · Subscribe in iTunes · Chapter-a-day Read by John Gonzalez mp3 and ogg files * The Ballad of Reading Gaol - 00:33:12 [mp3@64kbps - 15.9MB] [mp3@128kbps - 31.8MB] [ogg vorbis - 15.7MB]

Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde English, published in 1898 Categories: Poetry, Audiobook

s, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate

tes me to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good Uncle Thomas' library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on learning that my father's dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark in a seafaring life. These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet and for one year lived in a paradi

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley