The Ballad of Reading Gaol

In which a melancholy observer in prison contemplates a doomed man who has slain the thing he loved, and discovers - amid grey walls, drifting clouds, and the theatre of justice - that love and destruction are often intimate acquaintances. The spectacle of punishment becomes a meditation, exquisitely bitter and faintly ironic, on guilt, society, and the uncomfortable truth that every heart, in its own refined manner, is capable of murdering what it most adores.