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