ABSTRACT
If history repeats itself, so, likewise, does fable. Whatever else is to be said of this Ballad of Reading Gaol, it must be premised that none will fail to remark how the revisiting shade of immortal Glamour falls athwart every page of the poem under consideration. Grant that the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ coming off enchanted seas, in a subsequent career by land managed to get himself committed to an English prison, this is the tale of horrors wherewith he would have detained the wedding guest! No element that actual experience and accomplished art can contribute is here wanting to convey to the reader the bitterness of the situation, whether physically or spiritually considered,—the hardships and tedium to the flesh, the loathing and torment to the soul. The changing moods of pity, astonishment, infectious terror, dull apathy, that by turns lay hold of the prisoners, as they watch, day by day, the man who is doomed to ‘swing’ are vividly given; the quiet portraiture of the doomed man himself will not leave our mental vision:
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
