The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Poem by Oscar Wilde written in exile either in Berneval-le-Grand or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol, on 19 May 1897, where he had been incarcerated in after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895. During his imprisonment, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, was executed. Wilde wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" in mid-1897, where he narrates the execution of Wooldridge. "So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray."