Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
Genuine
Yes. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Part I, said by the poem’s ‘I’. These are the character’s words, not a statement in Wilde’s own voice.
Found word for word by program in the full text.
The wording people share differs from the text; the words in the text are underlined below.
- Work
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898
- Where
- Part I
- Found at
- Paragraph 14 of the text
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
Dear Christ! the very prison walls Suddenly seemed to reel, And the sky above my head became Like a casque of scorching steel; And, though I was a soul in pain, My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought Quickened his step, and why He looked upon the garish day With such a wistful eye; The man had killed the thing he loved And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!12
Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.
The scene
Wilde wrote the Ballad in France after his release, and it was published in 1898 under his prison number, C.3.3. It is about Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper of the Royal Horse Guards who cut his wife’s throat and was hanged at Reading on 7 July 1896, while Wilde was a prisoner there. In Part I the speaker watches the condemned man walking in the exercise yard, hears a voice whisper ‘That fellow’s got to swing’, and understands why he looks so wistfully at the sky: he had killed the thing he loved, and so he had to die. The next stanzas turn the charge on everyone; the poem ends with the refrain changed to ‘And all men kill the thing they love’.
What it means
Everyone destroys what they love in some way, by bitterness, flattery, betrayal or neglect; the hanged man only did with a knife what others do by other means, and he alone dies for it (‘Yet each man does not die’).
Often misread
Often quoted as a cynical saying about love, or as a line about murderous passion. In the poem it is a plea against judging and hanging: the murderer is no different in kind from those who condemn him. Readers have also heard in it Wilde’s own love for Lord Alfred Douglas and its ruin, which the poem does not name.
Also shared as
- ShortenedEach man kills the thing he loves. The line without its opening ‘Yet’, which ties it to the hanged man of the previous stanza.
- ShortenedAnd all men kill the thing they love. Wilde’s own variation in the closing stanza of the poem (Part VI), often quoted instead.
Before and after
Topics
Related quotes
- Some are born to enjoy illusions, others are cursed to see the truth. (not found) Friedrich Nietzsche
- I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. (misattributed) Maya Angelou
- Nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost
- Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. (not found) Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sources
Cite it
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Part I. Spoken by the poem’s ‘I’. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/each-man-kills-the-thing-he-loves/ (31 October 2026).
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Checked by people
People who checked this entry against its source, under their own names. Their checks do not change the verdict: an editor reviews every entry.
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