Ballad of Reading Gaol, (version 2)
By Oscar Wilde · Running time 00:42:51 · Poetry
Audio streams directly from the Internet Archive. Recording by LibriVox volunteers (public domain). The text is in the public domain in the USA; please check the copyright laws of your country.
About this book
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for acts of ‘gross indecency’. During his time at Reading Gaol, he witnessed a rare hanging, and in the three years between his release and his untimely death in 1900, was inspired to write the following poem, a meditation on the death penalty and the importance of forgiveness, even for (and especially for) something as heinous as murdering one’s spouse; for even the murderer, Wilde argues, is human and suffers more so for being the cause of his own pain, for ‘having killed the thing he loved’; for everyone is the cause of someone els
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