There are certain poems that I love that follow a story that I don’t relate to, but that doesn’t stop me from loving them or connecting to them. My dad has not been to prison and has not “killed the thing he loves,” yet something about the poem felt important to him at a specific time in his life. That leaves us with the question of why people are drawn to poetry in the first place. Such themes are universal to tragedy, which is what people experienced on 9/11 in a grand scale. Especially as the poem reaches its end, there is a transition from a more general attitude describing what prison is like to a deep sadness at the death. There is despair throughout the poem as the prisoners feel their own shame and watch the death of their fellow prisoner. The Ballad of Reading Gaol–while far from related plot-wise–does have some themes that I imagine would have resonated with someone at the time. I reread the poem thinking about that and wondering if that experience made him think of the poem in the days afterwards.

I was born on 9/11, and my dad was in Lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers fell. My dad did not connect to the actual material in the poem, but something about the poem made him want to read it in that moment. I thought about it a bit more, and thought about what draws us to poetry in the first place. Of course, a baby isn’t going to understand the poem, but it is interesting for a new parent to reach for such a poem to share with his daughter. The poem is fairly dark and has intense themes. His response was simple: “it’s a good poem.” That is true, but it still didn’t feel like enough of a justification. After I read the poem for class, I texted my dad and asked him why, of everything he could have chosen to read to me, he chose that poem.

It’s an odd thing to read to a newborn baby, and it is the first thing that was ever read to me. When I came home from the hospital after I was born, the first thing that my dad read to me was The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Oscar wilde poem the ballad of