Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde. Wilde Oscar

Or to give our anguish scope:

      Something was dead in each of us,

         And what was dead was Hope.

      For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,

         And will not swerve aside:

      It slays the weak, it slays the strong,

         It has a deadly stride:

      With iron heel it slays the strong,

         The monstrous parricide!

      We waited for the stroke of eight:

         Each tongue was thick with thirst:

      For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate

         That makes a man accursed,

      And Fate will use a running noose

         For the best man and the worst.

      We had no other thing to do,

         Save to wait for the sign to come:

      So, like things of stone in a valley lone,

         Quiet we sat and dumb:

      But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,

         Like a madman on a drum!

      With sudden shock the prison-clock

         Smote on the shivering air,

      And from all the gaol rose up a wail

         Of impotent despair,

      Like the sound that frightened marshes hear

         From some leper in his lair.

      And as one sees most fearful things

         In the crystal of a dream,

      We saw the greasy hempen rope

         Hooked to the blackened beam,

      And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare

         Strangled into a scream.

      And all the woe that moved him so

         That he gave that bitter cry,

      And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,

         None knew so well as I:

      For he who lives more lives than one

         More deaths than one must die.

IV

      There is no chapel on the day

         On which they hang a man:

      The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,

         Or his face is far too wan,

      Or there is that written in his eyes

         Which none should look upon.

      So they kept us close till nigh on noon,

         And then they rang the bell,

      And the Warders with their jingling keys

         Opened each listening cell,

      And down the iron stair we tramped,

         Each from his separate Hell.

      Out into God’s sweet air we went,

         But not in wonted way,

      For this man’s face was white with fear,

         And that man’s face was grey,

      And I never saw sad men who looked

         So wistfully at the day.

      I never saw sad men who looked

         With such a wistful eye

      Upon that little tent of blue

         We prisoners called the sky,

      And at every careless cloud that passed

         In happy freedom by.

      But there were those amongst us all

         Who walked with downcast head,

      And knew that, had each got his due,

         They should have died instead:

      He had but killed a thing that lived,

         Whilst they had killed the dead.

      For he who sins a second time

         Wakes a dead soul to pain,

      And draws it from its spotted shroud,

         And makes it bleed again,

      And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,

         And makes it bleed in vain!

      Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb

         With crooked arrows starred,

      Silently we went round and round

         The slippery asphalte yard;

      Silently we went round and round,

         And no man spoke a word.

      Silently we went round and round,

         And through each hollow mind

      The Memory of dreadful things

         Rushed like a dreadful wind,

      And Horror stalked before each man,

         And Terror crept behind.

      The Warders strutted up and down,

         And kept their herd of brutes,

      Their uniforms were spick and span,

         And they wore their Sunday suits,

      But we knew the work they had been at,

         By the quicklime on their boots.

      For where a grave had opened wide,

         There was no grave at all: