I found myself telling my students the story of fake news and real truth and broken spirits that was the result of Wilde's duel with Bosie's father, and I thought of modern politics and our current mess. And I heard myself tell the complicated story of Wilde and his miscalculations and his failure to silence a bully by shooting back at him. I seemed to have completely forgotten the love story between Winston and Julia, and the way it was impossible not to kill each other in the process of getting entangled in the political dystopia of thoughtcrime and doublethink. Today I found myself comparing Wilde with Orwell, in a rather heated discussion with students who are reading 1984 as a class novel. We may be guilty of one thing, and punished for another.
It strikes me as wise in the absurd way life plays a crooked game of cards with us. I annoyingly often quote the catch line "yet each man kills the things he loves", and it strikes me as true both in the deeper sense of family dysfunction and in the more shallow waters of breaking your favourite coffee mug by accident. I don't know how many times I have read the Ballad of Reading Gaol, but it is often enough for me to feel shame I don't know it by heart yet. Sadly, ‘The Ballad’ would be his last.Favourite poetry has a tendency to make sudden appearances in my head when I least expect it. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in 1898 and would gain Wilde greater recognition as a poet (in addition to being a great playwright) although his only other volume of poetry, one of his earliest works that he’d published, was also well-received. It is this that Jesus Christ could see he could continue to see the beauty of our humanity, despite all that we may do to each other, and encouraged us to love each other just the same. 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 else’s suffering and suffers at the hands of another. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for acts of ‘gross indecency’.
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