The Ballad of Reading Gaol the poem was chosen as the epitaph on Wilde's tomb; <poem>And alien tears will fill for him, For his mourners will be outcast men, <poem>So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray.</poem> The Ballad of Reading Gaol The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol () on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading
The Ballad of Reading Gaol book demanded a change—for fear that the prison doctor would sue over the line which originally read "While the coarse-mouthed doctor gloats", it was changed to "While some coarse-mouthed doctor gloats". As one biographer, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, said, "Never, perhaps, since Gray's "Elegy" had a poem been so revised, pruned, and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell". Originally the first edition—with no assurance of a second edition—was planned for only 400 copies, but when Wilde calculated the printing expenses, he realised that even selling all 400 would not cover costs, and at his instigation