The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

“Speranza” was the pen name of Lady Wilde, Oscar’s fascinating activist/writer mother, a famous woman in her own right. And his father was no slacker either. He grew up in an incredibly accomplished household. His mother was a political firebrand, basically, speechifying and poeticizing the cause of Irish nationalism. She held meetings at their house, she passed out pamphlets, she wrote poetry, she was a major figure. In 1864, an edition of her poems came out, and she dedicated it to her two sons. The dedication really gives a feeling for who she was, and a great snapshot of the feeling in Irish nationalists at that time.

Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

‘I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

So. That was Oscar Wilde’s famous mum. (Heaney talks about that dedication in his essay.)

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is, of course, Wilde’s long ballad about his experiences in prison (full text here). In this essay, Seamus Heaney analyzes the ballad as a poetic form, placing it in its proper literary context. Since the poem is so autobiographical, and it came out of Oscar Wilde’s terrible experience of being imprisoned for sodomy, those facts tend to overshadow the poem itself. Heaney is interested in the poem, what it represents, for Wilde (it is a real break in style), and how it connects Wilde to the very Irish ground from which he sprung, the Irish ground made plain to him by “Speranza.” The “prison ballad” has a long history in Ireland. I suppose prison ballads will have currency in any oppressed people. Wilde wrote it with a clear political intent in mind: to shine a light on the demeaning and inhumane conditions in prison, to perhaps bring about some change in that area.

Wilde had been pretty much apolitical, or at least he had never been political in a specific “let’s bring about change for this particular group” kind of way. His subversive epigrams and his topsy-turvy plays can be seen as political in a way because they up-end the status quo, almost in every line. They lampoon the sacred cows. They make fun of everyone, setting such elaborate and perfect traps that those with pretensions, or silliness, or flaws, literally cannot escape. It’s a brutal kind of humor.

But “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is a very different Oscar Wilde. It is a broken Oscar Wilde. It is a devastated and crushed Oscar Wilde. (He didn’t survive long after his release from prison. His health had been compromised beyond repair, and of course his spirit had been broken too.)

Those only familiar with his plays will immediately recognize the radical alteration of style. Those familiar with Oscar Wilde’s other poems will also immediately see (just by looking at the thing) that he is up to something different. His poems were usually lush, intricate, with long lines on the page. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, on the other hand, looks on the page like Kipling. Little boxy identical verses marching along irrevocably.

In Heaney’s essay about it, Heaney makes a case that Wilde, by “coming back” to the ballad form (and its propagandistic purposes) was “coming back” to the example led by his mother, Speranza, who also had her trials and tribulations in the public court (although not as literal as Wilde’s.) She was in the center of a couple of major scandals, some involving her husband, and she behaved with fierce loyalty and grace. Grace under public fire. (And anyone who attended Wilde’s trial spoke about his magnificence in the dock, how articulate, how inspiring. Like mother, like son.)

Heaney uses Speranza as the jumping-off point to talk about the various versions of “Ballad of Reading Gaol” that had been published (with some rather illuminating edits, the subject still seen as so controversial).

Yeats included it in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited, and he had done some very interesting edits on Wilde’s ballad. Yeats trying to protect Wilde, even after his death, from his own rhetorical excesses. Heaney goes into that as well, examining the edits and trying to figure out why Yeats decided they needed to go.

Here is an excerpt from the essay I find very interesting. (I love the point Heaney makes in the first paragraph. Yes!)

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”,’ by Seamus Heaney

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is Wilde’s poem of human solidarity, his attempt to produce, in Kafka’s great phrase, a book that would be an axe to break the frozen sea in each of us. Bu the literary fact of the matter is that the axe which is still capable of shattering the surfaces of convention is neither the realistic ballad which Yeats fashioned nor the original romantic plea from which he extracted it; it is rather the hard-edged, unpathetic prose that Wilde created in dialogues like ‘The Decay of Lying’ and dramas like The Importance of Being Earnest. His brilliant paradoxes, his over-the-topness at knocking the bottom out of things, the rightness of his wrong-footing, all that exhilarated high-wire word-play, all that freedom to affront and exult in his own uniqueness – that was Wilde’s true path towards solidarity. The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground. But when he stepped on earth to help the plight of lesser mortals, he became Oisin rather than Oscar. His strength dwindled and his distinction vanished. He became like other men. He became one of the chain-gang poets, a broken shadow of the brilliant litterateur who had once written that ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’ By the time he wrote the ballad, however, his aim had come to be the telling of the ugly true things:

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

All the same, if the propagandist ballad is not Oscar Wilde’s proper genre, it is still a kind of writing which was naturally available to him from the start. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, had begun her writing career in Dublin in the 1840s with a series of fiery patriotic poems published in the Dublin Magazine. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Speranza’ and under the impression that her family name, Elgee, meant that she was descended from the Alighieri family – as in Dante Alighieri – the future Lady Wilde composed poems that proclaimed a heartfelt sympathy for the plight of the famine victims in Ireland and a firebrand’s enthusiasm for the cause of rebellion against British rule. Speranza herself, of course, was from a well-to-do Dublin Unionist background, so her association with Charles Gavan Duffy and other activists and intellectuals in the circle was already an act of rebellion, an embrace of the forbidden other which foreshadowed her son’s more extreme rejection of the conventional pieties. And Oscar in his turn was very much in favour of the company she had kept. In a lecture which he gave in San Francisco in 1882 during his famous American tour, he was emphatic about his admiration for those revolutionaries of 1848. His lecture notes survive and contain declarations like the following:

As regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the cathedral. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well – tall and stately with a dignity of one who had fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed … John Mitchel, too, on his return to Ireland I saw, at my father’s table with his eagle eye and impassioned manner. Charles Gavan Duffy is one of my friends in London, and the poets among them were men who made lives noble poems also … The greatest of them all, and one of the best poets of this century in Europe was, I need not say, Thomas Davis. Born in the year 1814 at Mallow in County Cork, before he was thirty years of age, he and the other young men of the Nation newspaper had, to use Father Burke’s eloquent words, created ‘by sheer power of the Irish intellect, by sheer strength of Irish genius, a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’

It would have been no surprise if, after this, Wilde had gone on to write a poem of his own called ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times,’ where he might have wanted himself to be accounted, like Yeats, ‘one / With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ and recognized as the ‘True brother of a company / That sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong, / Ballad and story, rann and song.’ But it was surely the very deep-seatedness of Wilde’s familiarity with nineteenth-century Irish patriotic poetry that made him less susceptible to it as a mode of expression. Yeats was converted to Irish themes by the sudden glamour and admirable literary intelligence of John O’Leary, but for Wilde these themes were always a given, if passed-over, element in his heritage. And, of course, he was every bit aware as Yeats ever was of the artistic inadequacies of the work done by the Nation poets, an awareness he veiled very graciously in San Francisco when it came to reading poems by Speranza herself:

Of the quality of Speranza’s poems I, perhaps, should not speak, for criticism is disarmed before love, but I am content to abide by the verdict of the nation, which has so welcomed her genius and understood the song – noticeably for its strength and simplicity – that ballad of my mother’s on ‘The Trial of The Brothers Sheares’ in ’98.

This ballad about the trial of two brothers Wilde then proceeded to read and, in the light of all we know today, it was a most significant choice. Yet even at the time of the San Francisco reading, in 1883, long before Wilde’s own trials, it must already have had a special personal meaning for him. It had been placed first, after all, in Lady Wilde’s first collection of poems when it appeared in 1864. Oscar was then ten years of age and would have been deeply susceptible to the dedication page of the volume which read, ‘Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde’; the page also carried the following quotation:

I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them no doubt
That a country’s a thing men should die for at need.

In a book dedicated to them with such patriotic fervour, Oscar and Willie could hardly have failed to take to heart a poem actually called ‘The Brothers’, positioned so unignorably at the front of the collection. In it, the two protagonists are awaiting sentence for their part in the rebellion.

They are pale, but it is not fear that whitens
On each proud, high brow,
For the triumph of the martyr’s glory brightens
Around them even now …

IV

Before them, shrinking, cowering, scarcely human,
The base informer bends,
Who, Judas-like, could sell the blood of true men
While he clasped their hand as friends.

Clearly, it is not such a long poetic step from this story of the betrayal of noble youth by the handclasp of a friend to a realization that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ [in The Ballad of Reading Gaol]; nor is it possible to ignore the correspondence between this fictional court with its sentenced brother and informer witness – between this and the actual court where the testimony of rent boys would be crucial in securing the conviction of one of the brothers to whom Speranza’s ballad was so pointedly addressed. I am suggesting, in other words, that Oscar’s bearing, years later, in the ‘black dock’s dreadful pen’ may well have been affected by the noble demeanour of the character in his mother’s poem.