Showing results for "The Ballad" in Action & Adventure

The golden sun inked beneath the base of her neck is the reason for both. In Altaerra, it meant life as a Sunchosen, one of the twenty children branded by the Goddesses at birth to sit on the council ruling Altaerra. For Iris, it meant a fate confined in a glittering cage, forged and warped by power. Considered a traitor to the Divine after escaping the Bronze Palace as a child, Iris knows that maintaining her new life as an apothecary apprentice to the woman who saved her relies on remaining hidden.

In his illustrious career as a bard for the band known as Wanderlust, Bodrick has met countless beautiful women, slain untold foes, and done the impossible more times than he can count—not that that's saying much. It’s a good thing he has Plink Creamenickers, a mysterious and beautiful pixie from Court Creamenickers, to handle the math for him. But Bodrick’s golden retriever-like personality can be, ahem, hard for her to keep a leash on at times. It’s never long before his... certain extremities... lead him into one new escapade after another, broke or not.

Between 1895 and 1897 Oscar Wilde served a prison sentence for offences "of gross indecency". Most of this time was spent at Reading Gaol, where Wilde encountered another prisoner, Harles Thomas Wooldridge, sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Wooldrige was hanged at the gaol on 7th July, 1896. Wilde wrote the poem in France in 1897 after his release from prison. The poem is a long reflection on the inequity and ineffectiveness of statutory punishment and the redeeming power of the Christian message of forgiveness.

Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope. In this moving poetic study of his experiences in the Victorian penal system, Wilde relates the relentlessness and tedium of prison life, and of the haunted thoughts which trouble these "souls in agony" within their "numbered tombs". Oscar Wilde wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" after his two-year imprisonment at the establishment. During his incarceration, a former trooper was convicted of the murder of his wife and hanged at the Gaol. This event is central to the poem's narrative.