# Reading's quicklime recalls Wilde's poetry of compassion

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH06.P025](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH06.P025/#char=1695,1785): "go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime"

The combination of Reading prison, a hanged man and quicklime strongly recalls Oscar Wilde's *The Ballad of Reading Gaol*, first published in 1898. In part IV the warders' lime-marked boots disclose their work; the corpse lies naked under burning lime. The inspected text is the University of Toronto's transcription of *Poems*, with Temple Scott's introduction (Brentano's, 1910), a witness later than *Orthodoxy*, rather than the poem's first edition. [Wilde, IV.49–72](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ballad-reading-gaol).

The resemblance makes Chesterton's phrase 'Poetry could be acted as well as composed' especially pointed: he imagines a philanthropist bodily enacting the pity a modern poem can express. This is an interpretive connection, not an established borrowing. Wilde's poem also qualifies any simple opposition between medieval religious feeling and modern compassion: part V explicitly brings the executed man's broken heart and repentance into relation with Christ, and part VI awaits Christ's raising of the dead. [Wilde, V.37–72; VI.1–12](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ballad-reading-gaol). The poem provides a nearby modern example of religiously articulated pity, although it does not supply Chesterton's imagined public embrace by a wealthy reformer.

## Sources

- [Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol — Representative Poetry Online](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ballad-reading-gaol), Original Text metadata: Poems (New York: Brentano's, 1910), pp. 255–85; IV.49–72, V.37–72, VI.1–12; publication start year 1898

Revision 1 · 2026-11-07 · https://glosses.org/a/a_tdwolmgl/