The Ballad of Reading Gaol
A trooper of the Royal Horse Guards walks the exercise yard among men who all know what he did and what date has been fixed, and looks up at the little square of sky the wall permits him. The refrain insists that every man kills the thing he loves, some with a bitter look and some with a sword, and it works the condemned man's case outward until it has taken in everyone watching him. Wilde wrote it at Berneval after his release and published it over the number of his cell rather than his name.
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