ABSTRACT
The most remarkable poem that has appeared this year is, of course, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It has been much written about, but no one has commented, so far as I know, on the curious parallel between it and Mr. Kipling’s ‘Danny Deever’, the grim lyric which stands first in Barrack Room Ballads. The difference is just this: ‘Danny Deever’—ugly if you like, but a real poem-is a conspicuously manly piece of work; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, with all its feverish energy, is unmanly. The central emotion in the poem is the physical horror of death, when death comes, not as a relief or in a whirl of excitement, but as anabrupt shock to be dreaded. That the emotion is genuine admits of no doubt; but it is one very fit to be concealed. The writer’s dread of anything that pains the body extends even after death; again and again he insists on the horror of burial in quicklime, the soft fibres of flesh being lapped about in ‘a sheet of living flame’. If we were to judge poems by the test that Plato proposes-whether they will tend to strengthen or to enervate-we should put this poem very low indeed. Yet it has beautiful work in it, and touches of a genuine and honourable sympathy for the sorrow of weak things suffering.
